Memorial Coliseum

Most of the numbers from a sweeping study that Portland's City Council commissioned on Veterans Memorial Coliseum have not been released yet: not the market analysis that would estimate future bookings after a restoration, for example, or the cost of demolition. But last week the city released the one set of figures it has received from the study so far: the cost of different levels of restoration.

As reported by The Oregonian's Brad Schmidt, the study identified a basic restoration cost of $37 million, a more extensive one for $61 million, and a more comprehensive restoration at $89 million.

Schmidt's article, or at least the headline, identified this as a "big bill," and no doubt $37 to $89 million is indeed a lot of money. But while the reporting behind the headline is sound, I'd respectfully argue that some additional context ultimately needs to be added to this conversation.

First there's the yet-to-be-released study numbers, which will identify how these investments would lead to increased bookings for the building. Those numbers are due in approximately May, according to Susan Gibson-Hartnett, who is managing the project for the Office of Management & Finance.

The $37 million figure is not far from the $31.5 million plan spearheaded by the last mayor, Sam Adams, in 2012 during the final months of his term. It never came to a City Council vote. But as part of a public-private partnership, that deal included about $10 million in funds from the Portland Winterhawks franchise. According to Schmidt's article, the city currently has budgeted $23.3 million. That means there may be about $33.3 million if the team were willing to join the public-private partnership on its home again.

A recent Winterhawks game at Memorial Coliseum (photo by Brian Libby)

Second, there's the question of how such restorations as the city is contemplating for Memorial Coliseum would compare to building a new 8,000-seat arena (which the formerly 12,000-seat Coliseum would reportedly become after a restoration).

Restoration vs. new construction

Today Portland lacks a venue that is larger than the downtown theaters such as the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall or Keller Auditorium (which top out at just under 3,000 seats) and the approximately 20,000-seat Moda Center. Sure, there is the "Theater of the Clouds" configuration at the Moda Center, about 6,000 seats, but that's simply a curtaining off of the upper deck. And besides, the full-size Moda Center is booked often enough with Blazer games and other events that this configuration is somewhat rarely available.

In other words, the Coliseum fits a needed niche, and if we don't restore it, we'll eventually need to build a new venue in the 8,000-seat range. And it would be substantially more expensive than any of the three levels of restoration the city is studying.

Compared to $164-$251 million for a new arena, restoring the Coliseum for $37-89 million seems like a relative bargain.

Finding funds

How much can the city realistically afford to spend? Reportedly the city has $23.3 million currently available, and perhaps that $10 million from the Winterhawks could again be committed. The team understandably wants a new scoreboard, which isn't part of the $37 million study option. I'll bet that would have to be part of the investment. But the Winterhawks continue to be the anchor tenant there, so it makes sense to be a partner on improvements.

What else can the city do to raise funds? One option that seems to have been explored is redeveloping the two above-ground parking garages that sit beside the Moda Center and the Coliseum. A few months ago, Mayor Hales reportedly toured the garages with two prominent local developers, in order to discuss that possibility. I believe the garages were originally constructed in a way that allows buildings to be built on top of them. If the city as owner were to be able to add, say, a couple hundred thousand square feet of office and retail space to those buildings, while maintaining the parking, it could conceivably generate a few million dollars in funds that could be used on a Coliseum restoration.

Many cities around the world have financed refurbishments to existing facilities this way: by better leveraging the land around them. And the land around Veterans Memorial Coliseum is rapidly becoming more valuable as the broader neighborhood adds density and residents.

The garages aren't not all that could be in play. Along the river between the Broadway and Steel bridges but part of the Rose Quarter is the former Thunderbird Motel site, as well as the vacant parcel bordered by North Broadway, Larrabee Avenue and Benton Avenue. Each could conceivably add millions to the restoration fund by being redeveloped. So too could redeveloping the Blazers' hideous One Center Court building, a hybrid of architecture and parking garage that could better and more lucratively take advantage of that land with high-density construction. Why not add a hotel or housing here? It would put feet on the ground at the Rose Quarter when it's desperately needed in addition to generating more millions for a restoration. And it would make money for the Blazers too. The Coliseum could also be considered a partnering venue with the Oregon Convention Center, which is just a few yards away; many of the largest conventions often need a venue in the thousands for certain events to couple with the smaller everyday meeting spaces at the OCC.

Public-private partnership

Then there's the question of a bring on private partner in addition to the Winterhawks in order to generate more revenue. Mayor Hales was said to have spent months trying to woo Nike to become that partner, with the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships already set to come to Portland but scheduled for the Oregon Convention Center. Hales clearly saw that the Coliseum would have made a more compelling venue for the event than the windowless carpeted ballrooms frequented by conventioneers. Nike could have adopted the Coliseum as a venue for many of the sports it supports, while using part of the adjacent Rose Quarter land for a satellite office building. But the company, as it has done in the past, decided to stay within the confines of its protective berm in Beaverton.

Memorial Coliseum and Moda Center from the Broadway Bridge (photo by Brian Libby)

Another viable private partner would seem to be the Portland Trail Blazers and owner Paul Allen, the richest owner in professional sports. The Blazers have been allowed to manage the Coliseum on the city's behalf for many years, making money off the building but allowing it to fall into disrepair. Allen's team has been accused of a conflict of interest by at least one knowledgeable voice, Portland State University real estate professor William Macht. The team reportedly gets 40 percent of the Coliseum's net income, but 100 percent of Moda Center income, meaning there is a disincentive for the team to book events in the Coliseum.

If the Blazers or Allen's companies are earning income from the Coliseum, shouldn't they bear part of the financial responsibility in its restoration?

It's not just a question of responsibility, though. There is opportunity. The study numbers have not been released, but it would seem that a Coliseum restoration, at least one with a loading dock and scoreboard (as well as improved concessions and seats), would inevitably generate more revenue from increased bookings. That would create a greater revenue stream for the entity operating the building.

More than money

Everything I've written so far here has to do with money, either the cost of restoration or the anticipation of increased revenue. But this is not the only variable for the City of Portland to consider.

As we all know, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010 and is widely considered to be a leading example of mid-20th century modernism in the United States. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects and the US Green Building Council all have written letters to Portland City Council arguing for the building's preservation. Two of its other biggest supporters have been constituents: Rose Festival supporters and veterans. Memorial Coliseum was designed to be the home and originating site for the annual Grand Floral Parade. And while the building features memorial walls in its sunken gardens honoring Portland veterans who lost their lives in World War II and the Korean War, the entire light-filled building is itself a memorial. That's why veterans spearheaded its 2010 renaming from Memorial Coliseum to Veterans Memorial Coliseum: to emphasize and cement that idea.

Memorial Coliseum is indeed an architectural marvel, exemplifying the optimism and glassy transparency of the midcentury modernism embodied by Mies van der Rohe. Despite being the equivalent of about three city blocks in size, the entire structure stands on just four columns. But best feature has tragically been hidden away: a 360-degree view from one's seats to the outside. Yet for almost all of the building's history a black fabric curtain has blocked that view. Were the Coliseum's curtain to be left open regularly and made part of its marketing, it might generate any number of new uses, be it the public skating rink that used to exist there or an increase in concerts and other entertainment-oriented bookings. Back in the 1980s, celebrated Portland mayor Bud Clark used to hold his annual Mayor's Ball for charity there. Mr. Hales, why not do the same?

Memorial Coliseum (photo by Brian Libby)

Obviously as the co-founder of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum I'm not an impartial voice in this conversation. When the building first came under threat in 2009 to make way for a planned minor-league baseball stadium, I was one of those who became active in lobbying City Council to reject the move, which they eventually did. The ensuing years, however, have been a roller coaster. Mayor Adams had the courage to reverse course on Coliseum demolition, but he then began a Stakeholder Advisory Committee process that invited everyone to generate ideas except professional designers and planners; it brought forth an unrealistic set of options like a water park and a peace garden, even as the most obvious configuration stared us in the face: a multipurpose arena like the Coliseum has always been, only one whose owners and managers keep up with routine maintenance. Even in its state of disrepair and with a manager missing in action when it comes to promoting the venue, the building has continued to attract some 100 events a year.

After his election, Mayor Hales has said that the Coliseum ought to be restored, but rightfully argued that $31.5 million wasn't enough. That may be true, but even $31.5 million, or $37 million, would be a substantial first step. It sure would be better than the limbo the building has been in for the past six years.

Recently city leaders announced that the Portland Building, despite needing some $90 million in repairs, would be restored rather than torn down. It was a tough decision, because there are huge problems with the building's interior that can't be completely solved with a restoration but the building is an international landmark as the first major work of postmodern architecture in the world. I think the city made the right call on the Portland Building even though I'm not a big fan of the Michael Graves design. But if Portland's leaders had to make a call between the Portland Building and Memorial Coliseum, I'd advocate for the Coliseum in a heartbeat.

As I've said in past City Council testimony, the question of restoring Memorial Coliseum isn't just one of money and politics and the business of large venue management. It's a referendum on what kind of city we want to be. Portland is enjoying a renaissance today with attention from all over the globe for our quality of life. Much of that is social capital, but it starts with the fact that Portland is a well-designed city, with parks and mass transit and buildings that collectively constitute a place with energy where people want to be.

The Rose Quarter that includes the Moda Center and Memorial Coliseum lacks that energy today. It's a dead zone when there isn't a Blazer game or a big concert. But with the right restoration of the Coliseum coupled with redevelopment of the parking garages hemming in the two arenas (which may hold cars but are poisonous for place-making) and the equal eyesore of One Center Court, that can change.

Beyond the borders of the Rose Quarter itself, there's also a new streetcar line along North Broadway, bordering the Rose Quarter's northern property line. The adjacent Lloyd District is booming with more construction than it has seen in a generation, including a lot of housing, meaning more people on the street to patronize a potential mixed-use Rose Quarter in the future. Clearly this land is poised to become part of a more vibrant, high-density future, of which a restored Coliseum could become a vital centerpiece. Ultimately it should last longer than the Moda Center next door, which is already about 20 years old but lacks any admirers of its architecture if you disassociate it from the Blazers.

Hopefully the City Council quintet of Mayor Hales and Commissioners Nick Fish, Amanda Fritz, Dan Saltzman and Steve Novick will see how the Coliseum has held on this long for good reason. Hopefully they will see the opportunity as much as the challenge, like all good leaders do, and act on the building's behalf. We shouldn't commit $37 or $60 million or $89 million lightly. But in a lot of ways, be it economically or culturally, this is an investment to take pride in.

Five years ago Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Portland's National Register-listed landmark arena, was threatened with demolition to make way for a minor-league baseball stadium. When a coalition of citizens opposed the plan, then-mayor Sam Adams reversed course and the baseball blueprints were set aside. But in the ensuing years, Adams and his mayoral successor, Charlie Hales, have been unable to take the next step: restoring the building.

Now, although the Coliseum has already been looked at numerous times, Mayor Hales has commissioned a new study that includes four options to be evaluated: renovation, doing nothing, mothballing the building, or tearing it down.

Although commissioning a study could perhaps be construed as a delay tactic, there is actually good reason for it in this case. As I learned from meeting with City of Portland officials over the past year on behalf of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, local leaders don't even exactly know if the building operates at a profit or loss. That's because the Coliseum's parking proceeds are part of a large pool that also includes the adjacent Moda Center as well as Providence Park downtown.

Since Hales took office, there have been whispers that the mayor was seeking a private partner to make possible not just a Coliseum restoration, but a substantially bigger one than the just-over $30 million restoration that Adams nearly brought to a vote before his term expired. With Nike involved in bringing track and field's 2016 World Indoor Championships to Portland, rumors began circulating earlier this year that the event might be moved from the Oregon Convention Center to a new temporary track at the Coliseum as part of a larger public-private partnership. But those discussions, as best I can tell, don't seem to be hapening any longer, if they really did happen at all.

It makes one wonder if there are other potential private partners to be had, such as Paul Allen and Vulcan. After all, Allen's Blazers manage Veteran's Memorial Coliseum and previously had been involved in discussions during the Adams administration to re-design and build on the area. Thouth their plan set off alarms with its suburban feel, the broader Rose Quarter still, for all the cricket-chirping silence of its badly planned public areas today, has the potential to become a vibrant urban space if its parking garages were to be buried underground and new buildings added. The Rose Quarter's northern border, Northeast Broadway, just put in a new streetcar line, which Hales first championed some 15 years ago as a development tool while a City Council member.

But even if no deep-pocketed private partner can be found, a more modest restoration like the one that nearly came to a vote last year would be a step in the right direction - especially since it would include a $10 million investment from the Portland Winterhawks. So actually it already is a public-private partnership.

Although the Coliseum's parking-revenue question should indeed be answered, we know that the arena remains relatively busy desoute its deferred maintenance, with about 100 events a year. Chances are the study will show that the building operates at a modest loss. If that's the case, a restoration would seem to push the building into profit or at least breaking even. Imagine if someone ran the Coliseum in a way that was supported by a state-of-the-art renovation that embraced the uniqueness of its open-curtain configuration. It's a cultural and economic resources begging to be taken advantage of, but it needs someone with vision and a reverence for good design (be it past or present) to get involved.

Veterans Memorial Coliseum (photo by Julius Shulman)

As the co-founder of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, obviously I'm not an objective voice in this conversation. I believe that this building, along with the Pietro Belluschi-designed Equitable Building downtown (which is the world's first aluminum-glass curtain walled building), represents one of the best examples of mid-20th Century modern architecture that Portland has.

Memorial Coliseum is virtually the only major arena in the world with a 360-degree view to the outside. Standing inside the arena when its curtain is open, one can look out at the Willamette River and the entire downtown Portland skyline. The building is equivalent to about four city blocks in size, but the whole thing stands on just four columns. The concrete seating bowl also sits completely detached from the glass box surrounding it. Quite simply, it's the most pristine work of modern architecture the city has.

But forget the architecture for a moment and consider the economics.

Organizations like the Portland Business Alliance and the Oregon Sports Authority have already gone on record supporting a Coliseum restoration. "It can bring us economic impact multiple times the renovation," the OSA's Drew Mahalic told City Council in December 2012. The Oregon School Activities Association also uses Memorial Coliseum for many of its more than 100 state high school sports championships each year, but the organization doesn't have the budget to hold all of them at the privately-owned Moda Center.

When City Council neared a vote two years ago on a Coliseum restoration, the Portland Business Alliance's Carly Riter testified: "This project is exactly the kind of investment that urban renewal was designed to provide, and produces the short and long term benefits that epitomize the role of urban renewal. Second, this development will catalyze this area and spur economic investment in the broader Rose Quarter area. This project will provide certainty for other investors that the city is a dedicated partner in revitalizing this neighborhood. Third, it creates a local and regional benefit by offering a viable entertainment facility for the Portland Winterhawks and other events. This attracts new energy to the area, enlivening it with civic and economic activity. Having the city and the PDC involved in this project and poised to assist with future development opportunities in this area will support additional strategic investment."

Then there's the symbolic value of a Coliseum restoration or demolition. Great cities don't destroy their most treasured, National Register-listed architecture. Even if you don't love the look of the Coliseum, or modernist architecture, it would still be a stain on Portland's reputation, be it as an aspiring sustainability leader or as a design capitol -- both of which represent leading city aspirations and core strengths -- to tear down a building that national experts have deemed a landmark.

When City Council votes on the study, a "yes" vote may be warranted in order to gain hard numbers we should have had already on data like parking revenue, but we should urge Council to take demolition off the table. $30 million or $70 million (the range discussed for a renovation) isn't a small sum, but it would come largely from urban renewal dollars already being spent to make the combined Convention Center area and Lloyd District a vibrant, high-density corner of the city. As Portland considers investments like a subsidized headquarters hotel, tearing down Veterans Memorial Coliseum would be a step in the wrong direction, and would ignore the change that is already coming here.

The Coliseum has been beloved by Portlanders for generations. It's ground zero for Rose Festival's Grand Floral Parade, which originates there. It is the state's most important veterans memorial, honoring Oregon's fallen soldiers from World War II and the Korean War with not only its memorial plaques in a sunken garden outside the building but in the light-filled arena itself. And while nostalgia isn't a reason alone to save a building, this is a repository of our most treasured cultural history: a place where the Trail Blazers won an NBA championship and where everyone from The Beatles to the Dalai Lama have taken the stage.

Surely the five members of City Council are well aware of the Coliseum's heritage and its combination of cultural, historical and architectural value. When the study was originally commissioned, demolition reportedly wasn't even going to be included. So while recent media reports such as those by The Oregonian and KOIN have focused on the demolition threat, we may instead be working our way towards a restoration. While I'm as biased as anyone in this conversation, I'm far from the only one who loves this building. It never would have been saved from demolition five years ago had there not been a broad coalition of citizens rallying to its cause.

Is it time to lobby Council again to come to its senses, or are they already working towards a solution we can be proud of? Only time will tell, but the debate will be closely watched as a harbinger not only of the building's fate, but as a referendum on what kind of city Portland wants to be: a design capitol that treasures its heritage, or just another sprawling metropolis where the dollar and the lobbyist hold the biggest sway.

Imagine if Portland hosted the nation's biggest regular-season college basketball tournament, one featuring the top programs in America. Imagine the return of the US Figure Skating Championships, or the Dew Sports tour, or Davis Cup tennis. These are the very real bookings for Memorial Coliseum, and can generate enough economic activity to more than pay for its restoration. And don't listen to me say it: Listen to the experts.

Last week, Portland's City Council began the process of voting on a $31.5 million renovation plan for Memorial Coliseum. The plan would tap $10 million in donations from the Winterhawks hockey team and pair it with $17.1 in Portland Development Commision funding and $4.4 million in loans.

Although I was one of the people testifying last week in favor of the Coliseum restoration (on behalf of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum and supporting partners like the American Institute of Architects, the Cascadia chapter of the US Green Building Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation), I'd like to share here some of the other people's testimony. For while City Council invited public testimony from anyone in the community, not a single person spoke last week against the restoration, but countless community leaders came to argue for the building.

Tom Welter, executive director of the Oregon School Activities Association, which administers all school sports tournaments in the state, was one of those giving testimony.

"We conduct 116 state championships each year. We use Memorial Coliseum as much as the Rose Festival," said Welter. "Our first tournament was in 1966 and this is the 47th consecutive year. For our wrestling tournaments, we have 160 of our high schools come into Portland. But currently our basketball tournaments are not held there because the scoreboard doesn’t work. For the vast majority, it’s the pinnacle of their athletic career. We want to provide the best venue and experience possible. Right now we’re using the Rose Garden. We can’t afford to be there much longer, because we don’t draw the crowds. We’re very interested in moving that event to the Coliseum."

Welter's testimony was important because it helps articulate the model for a two-arena configuration such as we have with the Coliseum and the Rose Quarter. The Coliseum is our place for amateur athletics, for college graduations and community activities in addition to minor-leage Winterhawks hockey, while the Rose Garden is where our top pro team, the Trail Blazers, play and where top concert tours touch down.

But it's the two-arena configuration's ability to host large events in both arenas at once that gives the Coliseum added econonomic value.

Speaking of which, next came Drew Mahalic, CEO of the Oregon Sports Authority.

"It can be a catalyst for much-needed economic development," he told City Council. "The renovation of the Coliseum can place Portland in a class by itself. We’ll be the only city anywhere with two first-rate arenas just a few feet apart that can give us advantages to get events that nobody else can get. It gives us a chance to get back the US Figure Skating Championships, to get back the Dew Tour."

"In just a few years - this one excites me so much - we are going to be able to host the greatest in season basketball tournament of all time," Mahalic added, "with 24 teams coming to Portland - Kentucky, Duke, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida - to celebrate Phil Knight’s 80th birthday. That can’t happen without a renovated Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The economic impact from that event alone will exceed $31 million, which is the amount we’re talking about for the restoration.
This can give our city a competitive advantage. It can bring us economic impact multiple times the renovation. It’s really what we’ve been waiting for, and I would encourage you to favorably consider it."

Memorial Coliseum (photo by Brian Libby)

For those who question the Coliseum's architectural value despite its listing on the National Register of Historic Places, consider the economic support for the building offered by Carly Riter of the Portland Business Alliance.

"A lot
of painstaking and detailed work has gone into this proposal," Riter told City Council. "The result is a
collaborative deal that works, that lays the groundwork for future
partnerships, and provides real community benefit for the neighborhood, the
city, and the region. This project is exactly the kind of investment that urban
renewal was designed to provide, and produces the short and long term benefits
that epitomize the role of urban renewal."

"Second, this development will catalyze this area and spur economic investment in the broader Rose Quarter area," Riter added. "This project will provide certainty for other investors that the city is a dedicated partner in revitalizing this neighborhood.
Third, it creates a local and regional benefit by offering a viable entertainment facility for the Portland Winterhawks and other events. This attracts new energy to the area, enlivening it with civic and economic activity. Having the city and the PDC involved in this project and poised to assist with future development opportunities in this area will support additional strategic investment."

Ronald Carr addressed Mayor Adams and Council on behalf of local veterans.

"We are veterans and we know what it means to serve…as well as the sacrifices made by our families back home," Carr said. "We remember every person who gave a sacrifice…in America we value the life of every human being, and this is a driving force in everything we do as veterans. We leave no one behind and we remember. Forever, we remember."

"Throughout our history, we’ve heard many battle cries: Remember the Maine. Remember the Alamo. Remember Pearl Harbor, and remember 9/11," Carr added. "It’s not just that we want to remember. It’s also that we need to remember. We need to help other people in other generations remember by sharing these stories, memories and traditions with our children and grandchildren. This is why the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and Memorial Gardens are so important to our community and society. It comes down to something as simple as this: we want and need to remember, but it is extremely important to never forget."

Finally, Jeff Curtis of the Portland Rose Festival Foundation spoke. "This is the home of our largest event and a significant one. It’s part of our history," he told the Council. "Back in 1961, the Rose Festival was one of the stakeholders that was part of a conversation to get the building constructed. We were one of the first events in that facility. The facility designed its doors in parallel fashion specifically to be the home of the Grand Floral Parade. So there’s a lot of historical and emotional ties to our beloved Grand Floral Parade. There’s an economic value to the Rose Festival, and the building is a big factor in our Grand Floral Parade and our operating budget. But it also provides an opportunity for tour groups, seniors, who don’t want to go out on the streets. It’s the only parade venue in the United States that’s indoors. That’s a competitive advantage in the special events and tourism market."

Finally, Fred Leeson, president of the Architectural Heritage Center (and a contributor to this blog) addressed Council.

"I read through the ordinances yesterday online, and I noticed all the references to the economic risk," Leeson began. "I just wanted remind some of you who probably were not here in the 1970s, when I was a newspaper reporter for the Oregon Journal and covering the Exposition and Recreation Commission, which then managed the Coliseum, is that the Coliseum gave up literally millions of dollars from its revenue to subsidize Civic Stadium and Civic Auditorium. In so in a sense, in supporting the Coliseum now, we’re making good on a past debt."

City Council is tentatively set to vote next week on the Coliseum restoration. The coalition of public and private sector stakeholders making this project happen is a fragile one: the announcement recently of major sanctions against the Winterhawks by the Western Hockey League sent some around City Hall wondering if it would force the team to back out of the deal. So far that hasn't happened, and Mayor Adams spoke personnally with the team's owner recently, receiving a renewed expression of support for the Coliseum restoration. The incoming City Council set to take office next year may also want to weigh in. But for now, with a little luck, the saving of this great building may be within reach.

It's a vote that has been more than three years in the making, but will demonstrate our city's values for generations to come. This Thursday, City Council will vote on the proposed $31 million deal to restore Memorial Coliseum, the one-of-a-kind arena at the heart of a transforming Rose Quarter district.

The vote had been expected more than a year ago, with City Council already ruling on numerous occasions to go forward with negotiations and designs. But because of the extremely intricate and sensitive deal structure, which involves the Trail Blazers' Portland Arena Management and an extension of that agency's running of both arenas (even though one is privately owned and one public), and which involves urban renewal dollars from numerous sources, the decision by Council is only coming now.

Under the proposed deal, the Portland Development Commission would be responsible for $17.1 million the Coliseum and the Winterhawks hockey team would contribute $10 million. PDC would also loan the city $4.4 million, to be repaid over 20 years from ticket-tax and parking revenues.

In other words, the city is receiving $10 million in free renovations, and all we have to do is spend $17 million. It's not to say $17 million isn't a lot of money, but given that the Coliseum is a profitable arena - even hosting more events some years than the Rose Garden next door - that is an investment in making more money. The two-arena configuration also helps the Rose Quarter generate more revenue than it would with one arena.

What's more, there is a huge amount of untapped revenue sitting in the Rose Quarter that can help further renovate the district and the arena. The Coliseum in particular is surrounded by asphalt and concrete, land the city can sell the development rights to without compromising the parking revenue of the two buildings' shared parking garages. Simply build over the parking with high-density, mixed-use buildings and there are millions to be made. That can act as leverage for restoring and maintaining the Coliseum. The Coliseum also is the only arena or auditorium in Portland of that size, about 6,000-8,000 (after the restoration). If we don't restore the Coliseum, we'll eventually need to build a new facility to match that audience size. And it would cost much more than $17.1 million.

And with a new streetcar line along the Rose Quarter's northern edge, the value of this land is starting to rise exponentially. We've already seen this happen in the Pearl District. The city needs to stop worrying about the $17.1 million contribution to the Coliseum and think about the money to be made in enabling development along Broadway.

Bottom line: the Coliseum is a net money maker in the long run, even though its deferred maintenance is a short-term drain.

And when you add the developable riverfront property along the Rose Quarter's western edge, the value of this broader parcel becomes even greater. After all, how can we debate whether to keep a world-renowned, money-making arena when we're using exceptionally valuable riverfront central-city land as a surface parking lot? What are we, Phoenix? Las Vegas?

The Rose Quarter should be Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square moment: a chance to reshape the center of the city with high-density, pedestrian-friendly, sustainable development. We should be dreaming about how this primary east-side transit center can be filled with hotels, offices, retail and residences, a win-win for everyone. Instead, we're like a cat that turns from grooming its coat to eating its fur off. We worry about restoring a great arena with a busy, lucrative schedule at bargain basement prices instead of how that restoration can unleash millions in private development.

By now I've written countless times about Memorial Coliseum's special architecture. But in case you're reading about this for the first time, keep in mind: this is more or less the only major arena in the world with a 360-degree view to the outside. Stand in the Coliseum's seating bowl and you can see the entire downtown skyline and the Willamette River. But that view has been blocked away with a fabric black curtain for most of the building's history in order to make it like any other arena. As it happens, though, unique design has tremendous economic value. If we open the curtain for good, we can give Memorial Coliseum an all new identity based on the ability to have indoor events that feel like they're outside: something perfect for our rainy climate.

Memorial Coliseum is the equivalent of four city blocks in size, but it's standing on just four columns. It was completed in 1960, embodying the era of JFK, NASA and post-war optimism in America. It was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the great American architecture firms of the 20th century, responsible for icons like the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Burj Kalifa tower in Dubai (currently the world's tallest building), and the new World Trade Center in New York. Throughout the United States and the world, this era of modern architecture has come to be celebrated for its simple fusion of glass, steel and concrete.

Memorial Coliseum gives Portland the kind of architectural history it otherwise largely lacks compared to older cities of the eastern United States and of Europe. Our city once destroyed much of its heritage by tearing down most of its waterfront cast-iron architecture of the early 20th century, something that has cost us economically as well as culturally, as such historic districts have shown their value to succeeding generations. With the City Council's approval of Memorial Coliseum's restoration on Thursday, we can demonstrate that Portland now appreciates and protects its most special places.

In recent decades, Portland has faced an ultimatum for some of its most cherished and architecturally significant buildings, such as City Hall and Central Library. In those cases, the city has restored rather than replaced, a decision no one argues today. Why would we do differently for a building with even more international historic architectural value in Memorial Coliseum? It doesn't have the detailed exterior facade of either of those old buildings because it's from the midcentury-modern era, defined by open space, light, volume and streamlined style. Yet Memorial Coliseum is the most architecturally significant building in Portland. You don't have to be a fan of modernism to recognize that it's now officially historic.

Rose Parade at Memorial Coliseum, 2010 (photo by Jeremy Bitterman)

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects, and the US Green Building Council have all sent letters to Mayor Adams and Council expressing support for Memorial Coliseum's restoration.

Memorial Coliseum is also a veterans memorial that the war veterans of Oregon have rallied to protect. (It's now officially called Veterans Memorial Coliseum.) They recognize that it's not just the memorial plaques outside the building that honor veterans: it's the whole building that does so, with the arena's unmatched openness to the outside sunlight symbolizing an inoculation against the terrors of World War II. When I work to support Memorial Coliseum's survival, for example, it's with the support of my 91-year-old grandfather, a WWII vet who landed at Normandy as part of the D-Day invasion and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Of course there are, at first glance, reasons to be skeptical of the Coliseum plan. It's being voted on during a lame-duck City Council session. It devotes scarce city dollars to an arena when we already have a newer one next door. But the more one looks at the blend of economic, historical and cultural factors swirling around the Coliseum and Rose Quarter, the more this restoration seems to pay for itself, many times over.

The Coliseum can be called America's only transparent arena. And whether we keep or discard our historic architecture will make transparent Portland's values about design, the environment, history and the future of place-making in our city.

As a co-founder of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, I can't pretend any impartiality or objectivity on this vote. Memorial Coliseum is the only issue for which I've ever deliberately abandoned my journalist's role and embraced full-fledged activism. But as someone born and raised in Oregon, who grew up watching concerts and basketball games at Memorial Coliseum, I can't walk away from our responsibility to history. As a journalist who has spent more than a decade writing about design in Portland and the broader world, I can't sit on the sidelines as the future of what I see as the city's greatest building hangs in the balance - or as the centerpiece of our next great central-city district takes shape.

Here’s question that might be novel in the history of architecture. Can a single building have two exteriors?

The issue arose when the Portland Landmarks Commission on May 14 considered proposed renovations to the “exterior” of Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Under Portland’s zoning code, the commission cannot rule on changes to an interior space unless the interior space itself has been designated as a landmark.

That distinction was troubling to two landmarks commissioners, who said the building’s unique “bowl-within-a-glass box” design makes the concrete seating bowl an essential element to the building’s external appearance.

“In my mind we really have two significant exteriors, the bowl and the glass,” said Harris Matarazzo, a Portland lawyer who sits on the commission. Matarazzo said he didn’t think it was appropriate for the commission to approve changes to the building’s appearance when the city has not yet revealed all the changes is hopes to make inside the building. He added that to his way of thinking, the Coliseum’s “interior” was located inside the seating bowl.

Kevin Brake, a project manager for the Portland Development Commission that is managing the Coliseum upgrades, said there would be “no modifications to the bowl itself.” Inside the Coliseum, he said the bowl would be fitted with new seats, plumbing would be replaced, restrooms upgraded, new audio-visual equipment and a new scoreboard. Outside the bowl, he said there would be changes to concession stands, lighting and differing paint colors.

When Matarazzo asked whether the building would look any different to an observer from the outside, Brake replied, “It will be generally similar in form and presentation.”

Paul Solimano, another landmarks commissioner, agreed with Matarazzo about the important of the bowl’s appearance looking at the Coliseum from the outside. Based on the detailed building history that led to placement of the Coliseum on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, Solimano said, “I’m not convinced the interior is not covered” by the commission’s jurisdiction.

But David Skilton, a city preservation planner, said the National Register listing has no bearing on the city’s own rules for regulating landmarks. Under the city code, Skilton said the commission’s only jurisdiction is over a building’s exterior, unless an interior space specifically has been given local landmark status.

The “exterior” changes include a new, better-insulated roof that will not be visible from ground level, and renovations to the swooping entry canopy that will better reflect the original design. The PDC had originally asked that the so-called Pine Court, an outdoor plaza that was added several years after the Coliseum was finished, be removed to make way for a new design. However, that element of the application was dropped. The PDC is expected to return later with detailed plans for the Pine Court and for the Fountain Court that was the original monument for veterans killed in wars.

Matarazzo cast the lone vote against the exterior changes, saying it was inappropriate to approve them without knowing the full scope of proposed improvements. “I can’t put aside what I think our mandate is for the purpose of expedience,” he said.

The commission asked, and Brake agreed, to hold an advisory session at some future date when all proposed changes will be presented and discussed. But given the city’s interpretation of the landmarks commission’s jurisdiction, recommendations from the landmarks panel about any changes inside the Coliseum’s glass walls would be advisory rather than binding.

The battle to save Memorial Coliseum from demolition was won three years ago. Now the battle – skirmish, is more like it – is over how the landmark building will be renovated for further use as an event arena.

Two architects who worked mightily to place the Coliseum on the National Register of Historic Places, Peter Meijer and Kristen Minor, objected strongly this week when the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission took a first look at several comparatively minor changes proposed for the Coliseum’s exterior.

Meijer and Minor contended that the commission also should be reviewing changes that will occur inside the International Style monument, even though city regulations limit the commission’s purview to exterior changes on designated landmarks.

“We don’t see any rational reason why the whole project doesn’t come before you,” Meijer said. He said the basic building design – an oval concrete seating bowl inside a four-sided glass box – was intended to expose the interior to public view from the outside. He said the inherent design makes no distinction between the building’s its interior and exterior.

Which begs the question: What’s the plan for the interior? So far, no formal plans have been filed with the city development office. Kevin Brake, a senior project manager for the Portland Development Commission that is overseeing the renovation, said the interior changes “primarily” concern color and lighting. He said there were no changes planned for the interior bowl, although some representatives from veterans’ groups said the number of seats inside the bowl apparently will be reduced.

Tim Heron, a senior city manager who is the chief staff to the landmarks commission, said the city zoning code does not allow for review of interior changes unless the space is designated as an interior landmark. He said the only two interior landmarks designated by the city are two restaurants, Huber’s and Jake’s Famous Crawfish.

For procedural reasons, the landmarks commission cannot rule on the proposed exterior changes until May 14 at the earliest. It was clear from the opening discussion on April 9, however, that the commission sees no problem with a new roof that will add four inches of solid insulation or with some minor changes to stairway railings. The thicker roof will not be visible above a low parapet.

The commission, in accord with a staff recommendation, headed off a proposed change to the curvilinear, swooping entry pavilion that significantly differed from the building’s original 1960 design. The PDC had asked to line the underside of pavilion roof with narrow cedar slats over a black background to disguise deterioration in the ceiling. The original plaster ceiling was covered in approximately 1993 with beaded-plywood that was painted white.

Based on the commission’s discussion, Robert Mawson, a consultant working with the PDC, agreed to drop the cedar slats and install a new ceiling of a white, “plaster-like” material, instead. He said the cedar slats had been proposed as a less-costly solution. Mawson said the renovation plan includes removing paint from the glu-lam beams that support the swooping roof so the beams will appear as they originally did when the building opened early in 1961.

Another skirmish in the renovation involves the so-called “Pine Court,” a lower-level plaza on the southeast side of the building. Originally vacant when the Coliseum opened, a brick plaza and concrete planter were added later, possibly in 1967. The plaza may have been designed by the Skidmore Owings Merrill firm that designed the Coliseum, although it seems to relate to a different design aesthetic.

The PDC has asked the landmarks commission to remove the Pine Court plaza while it works with veterans organizations to design a more fitting memorial in the same location. The plaza includes a low memorial wall with names of soldiers killed in the Korean War. The commission, however, expressed reluctance to demolish the Pine Court before a new design is proposed. Brake said the PDC is working with a committee of veterans, but if past history is any hint, those talks are likely to be lengthy and boisterous. The delay should provide more time to investigate the history and design of the Pine Court, in the event that strong sentiment emerges to save it.

This Thursday, Mayor Sam Adams will present to Portland's City Council the plan to restore historic Memorial Coliseum. The price tag for the project is currently projected to be $30.5 million, which includes more than $17 million in public funds via the city's Oregon Convention Center urban renewal district. The Portland Winterhawks would kick in $10 million and historic tax credits would cover $3.4 million. These are non-binding numbers, and negotiations are expected to continue.

But let's be clear: it's time to restore this building, both as a cultural treasure and as a catalyst for high-density development in the city's most important east-side urban core. This isn't just about Memorial Coliseum, but about revitalizing the entire Rose Quarter development with a world-renowned midcentury modern arena as its epicenter.

Given the economy's continuing sluggishness and the reduced funding available for numerous government programs from schools to transit, one can understand skepticism about a large public investment. Yet, as Adams knows, it takes stimulus to jump-start an economy, not austerity measures. What's more, the city's investment is just that: a use of urban renewal funds to, well, renew a key urban place in the city - just as the fund was set up to do by the Portland Development Commission several decades ago.

Coliseum's north and west facades (photo by Brian Libby)

Adams has taken some heat for the Coliseum restoration plan from people outside of the architecture, sustainability, business and development communities who question why Portland needs two arenas next door to each other, or from people who preferred the Coliseum be torn down for a Portland Beavers baseball stadium.

The Beavers and their approximately 1,800 season ticket holders (in 2009) would not have comprised a sound economic development strategy for the Rose Quarter, especially during the majority of the year that isn't baseball season. It's truly unfortunate the team wasn't able to find a way to build a stadium elsewhere in the metro area - Beaverton, Clackamas, Lents and Vancouver all rejected overtures - yet a busy multipurpose arena like the Coliseum is much more of a continuous revenue stream for the city. It hosts over 150 events per year, as much as the Rose Garden - only with smaller crowds.

Because the two arenas are differently sized - the Rose Garden at approximately 20,000 and the Coliseum being downsized to about 8,000 - they each fill a different economic niche. Portland doesn't have another arena of the Coliseum's size, so we'd eventually have to build a new one. And a from-the-ground-up arena would cost far, far more than this $30 million restoration - only $17 million of which is coming from city money anyway - not to mention all the carbon and embodied energy that would be lost if the Coliseum were torn down.

Then, of course, there is the fact that Memorial Coliseum is both a major landmark of 20th century modern architecture and a veterans memorial. As its listing on the National Register of Historic Places indicates, the Coliseum is architecturally unique: the only major arena in the world with a 360-degree view to the outside. The Coliseum is the equivalent of four city blocks in size, but stands on just four columns. Although its boxy class form is beautiful to some and banal to others, what's really special about the design - like much contemporary architecture - is the volume of space it creates.

Unfortunately, there is a huge disconnect between the Coliseum's greatest attribute and the public that has visited the building for generations. Instead of celebrating the uniqueness of a major interior arena with a matchless view to the outside - a Roman Coliseum encased in a modernist glass box - the Memorial Coliseum operators have for decades closed off the incredible view of the Willamette and downtown Portland with a fabric curtain. As a result, thousands of Oregonians grew up with the same experience (or lack thereof) I did: going to countless concerts and Blazer games over the 1970s, 80s and 90s without ever experiencing the building as it was intended.

When I talk about the open-curtain setting of the Coliseum with its view through the glass, it isn't just a case of an art-and-architecture writer getting misty eyed over some obscure design move the public can't appreciate or that goes against prudent budget consciousness.

The open curtain gives Memorial Coliseum the chance to transcend ordinary arenas and become the kind of truly unique public gathering place that defines and empowers a city. How many other cities have a giant indoor arena that makes you feel like you're outdoors? Zero.

That uniqueness has economic value as well as social value. A building that can attract people not just because of what's booked there but as an experience in itself is a building that can be routinely booked, bringing a revenue stream to this city-owned structure.

What's more, saving and restoring Memorial Coliseum is the ultimate demonstration of how Portland does things differently. No other city has saved a large arena next door to the one that replaced it. But no other city in the 1980s was throwing itself into a light rail system. No other city in the 1970s was ripping out freeways and passing bottle bills. Just as it has done with sustainability and urban planning, not to mention the Portlandia-celebrated culture being cultivated here, Portland makes up for its lack of wealth and size with pioneering initiatives that often become the new normal in the rest of the United States. And in a time of both environmental disaster and economic gloom, Memorial Coliseum can represent a commitment to progressive values: of investing ecomically in new projects to bring jobs, and protecting our region's greatest cultural assets.

Of course there are questions that remain with regard to the deal. Council members may be concerned with how the $17 million from the Oregon Convention Center urban renewal area might take away from funds meant to improve Martin Luther King Boulevard. And urban renewal dollars must legally include about 30 percent set aside from affordable housing. Can we fit this into the Rose Quarter mix along with the arenas?

That said, the Coliseum can act as a catalyst that will allow high-density housing as part of its mix and prompt private development. It will act as a sister venue to the Convention Center that will help attract larger bookings. The Coliseum will catalyze the Rose Quarter: a gem that lends energy to surrounding developments.

City Council is expected to begin discussion of the Memorial Coliseum restoration at approximately 2PM this Thursday (November 17). If you feel as I do about this masterful building, please consider coming to City Hall and making your voice heard. Or if you can't make it to provide testimony in person, please consider writing today to Mayor Adams (MayorSam@portlandoregon.gov) and his fellow City Council members (Amanda Fritz, amanda@portlandoregon.gov; Nick Fish, Nick@portlandoregon.gov; Dan Saltzman, dan@portlandoregon.gov; Randy Leonard, randy@portlandoregon.cov.

Today the Portland Development Commission announced the city's selection of architects for the renovation of Memorial Coliseum. A team led by Portland firm Opsis Architecture and Mineappolis-based Ellerbe Becket won the job over the sole other team, Portland's BOORA and Kansas City's Populous (formerly known as HOK).

Many believed that BOORA and Populous had the inside track because BOORA performed feasibility-study work for PDC on the Coliseum in the past, assessing what work needed to be done, which in turn fed the Request For Proposals the agency issued for the job. Populous has also designed or co-designed an incredible array of stadiums and arenas around the world, such as the new Yankee Stadium, the new Wembley Stadium in London (with Norman Foster), Stadium Australia in Sydney (home of the 2000 Olympics), Wimbledon Centre Court, Minneapolis's Target Field, San Francisco's AT&T Park, Chicago's United Center arena, Cleveland Browns Stadium, Pittsburgh's Heinz Field, Houston's Reliant Stadium, and Arsenal's Emirates Stadium in London.

However, the one firm in America with arguably as much experience as Populous with stadiums and arenas is Ellerbe Becket. And unlike Populous, Ellerbe has numerous previous projects in Oregon. They were the architect of PGE Park's transformation into Jeld-Wen Field, the co-designer of Matthew Knight Arena in Eugene, which opened earlier this year, as well as the architect for Autzen Stadium's expansion in 2002. And while Opsis didn't have BOORA's incumbency as the competing local firm, or even BOORA's experience with large-scale public buildings, the Opsis-Ellerbe team also included Portland architect Peter Meijer, who wrote the National Register listing for the Coliseum, bringing matchless historical knowledge. Another factor may have been passion of co-founding principal James Meyer.

"I have a John Storrs house on the coast, in Neakhanie, built in 1960, The kind of character and quality, what these guys were doing in 1960 with the Colisem is pretty breathtaking," Meyer said in a phone interview this morning. "I’ll always take incumbency. It’s a bit of a gift. But it’s kind of what you do with it. As I said in the RFP interview, I’m naïve. I’m not going to believe they won’t choose what’s right for the city and the community. With that in mind, I set the bar really high. Ellerbe, holey moley. That was the first phone call I made. It’s the Coliseum, for criminy sake. I think we were able to think fast. You want to come at this thing with a really clean but yet compelling plan."

Fast is an operative word. The deadline for firms to respond to PDC's proposal came only about two weeks after it was issued. For many PDC projects, this time frame is actually the norm. But for a project with the scale, budget and legacy of Memorial Coliseum, the fact that only two teams submitted proposals may be an indication that the window of opportunity was too small. One local architect, for example, sought to form a team with legendary London architect Norman Foster, but Foster's office declined because they didn't feel there was enough time to prepare a design proposal.

Why the short time frame? "The project is very well scoped already and moving directly into schematic design," explained Kevin Brake of the Development Commission. Even more importantly, he added, the start of the Portland Winter Hawks' season in October of next year "is driving a very tight timeline, and if we miss the full closure construction window (June-October), we lose a year and the cost will go up." Construction is expected to begin in Spring of 2012 and complete in late summer.

The Opsis-Ellerbe-Meijer design started with the bowl. "We had three big opportunities. There’s little stuff all over the place. The quick hits we had were really the conceptualization of this bowl being porous. The top of the seating area is open, but we also wanted more concourse interface. That’s part of the magic of it: where you’re porous and how you enter. As you enter the bowl, it’s your visibility connection." Look for entries to the seating bowl, Meyer explained, to possibly be wider. The design also proposes eliminating the second glass wall as one enters the buiding.

The city-issued RFP treated the Coliseum project within its four walls to comprise the job, with the renovation of the outdoor sunken memorials area treated as a separate project. But the winning design proposal also addressed this area. "The scope of work doesn’t get you past the window wall, but we want to have a long-term plan," Meyer adds. His team proposes removing the barrier between the two sides of the memorial plaza. Meyer also hopes the Opsis-Ellerbe team will be ultimatley able to address the broader ground-level plaza between the Coliseum and the Rose Garden. "You think about the history of Portland and open space: there’s recent stuff like Jamison square, there's also Pioneer Courthouse Square and the Halprin Fountains. The Coliseum plaza is small but it’s right sized to do something special like that."

"It was super comfortable and super complimentary," Meyer says of the fastracked design process. "We felt there we had the expertise but also the culture: the listening ability. And when you look at the Coliseum, it's an opportunity-rich environment in terms of the physical space. This place is gorgeous. There’s a ton of nuance in there. But you also have to understand that with a legacy building like this, a lot of those emotive aspecs are as important as anything."

Rendering of Memorial Coliseum, 1958 (courtesy City of Portland archives)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's Daily Journal of Commerce, Nick Bjork reports that a local company seeks to convert Memorial Coliseum into a media production center.

As Bjork's article details, the plan is led by Tim Laurence founder of Beaverton's Digital Works Productions, and Rob Cornilles, founder of consulting firm Game Face. The Coliseum’s interior would be divided into three soundstages totaling 51,000 square feet with additional theaters and offices, all divided over four stories. “I wasn’t familiar with this building at first, so I just wasn’t sure,” their Tustin, California-based architect, Gary Bastien, told the DJC. “But the more I find out about this one the more it seems like an ideal structure.”

Since the battle in 2009-10 to save Memorial Coliseum from demolition to make way for a minor league baseball stadium, there have been a host of ideas, most of which were floated during a city-led process seeking out contributions from the community about how to best utilize the landmark National Register-protected modernist arena. There was the idea of a water park. There was a peace garden. There was an athletic center. Legitimate, highly funded proposals by prominent developers were made alongside grassroots efforts detailed with magic markers on posterboard.

What Mayor Adams, the Portland Development Commission and a Citizen Advisory Group ultimately concluded (and what the building's preservationists were clamoring all along) is that Memorial Coliseum (or "Veteran's Memorial Coliseum", as it has since been officially renamed), is already economically viable as a multi-purpose arena. In fact, last year the Coliseum actually drew more events than even the much newer, larger Rose Garden Arena next door. It just draws smaller events, which is why the plan emerged to restore the arena with about 8,000 seats rather than the 10,000-12,000 it originally had. So the plan to restore it is rooted in sound financial findings. At the same time, this also must be weighed against cultural, sustainable and historic concerns. Luckily, the green thing to do, and the most mindful of history, was to let Memorial Coliseum be Memorial Coliseum - only with the maintenance it should have received a long time ago. This isn't about preserving history, though, but marrying the past with the future. It's what great cities are all about.

Memorial Coliseum is the only arena with a 360-degree view to the outside, hence its nickname, "The Glass Palace." The building was designed by perhaps the most eminent American architecture firm of the 20th century: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. While some may see today an outdated building in need of deferred maintenance, Memorial Coliseum is a signature work of mid-20th century architecture. It embodies the generation of glassy buildings that followed the end of World War II, a time when architects created futuristic, transparent buildings that spoke to the desire for peace and prosperity. Memorial Coliseum is, as its new name indicates, a veterans memorial: that's true not just for the commemorative placques outside the building listing the name of Portlanders who served in the historic conflict, but in how this one-of-a-kind arena, with its panoramic view outside to the downtown skyline, makes light itself (as opposed to the dark claustrophobia of the war) the star attraction.

Memorial Coliseum, 2009 (photo by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)

It's easy for people to mistakenly think that Memorial Coliseum is still up for grabs. For example, last week in a letter to the editor published in The Oregonian, local citizen Alan Willis suggested that Portland should revisit the notion of building a baseball stadium at the Rose Quarter.

Why the vaccuum? The Portland Development Commission and the City Council have been slow in hammering out the details of the restoration plan: where (or from which urban renewal area) the funding will come from, how the Rose Quarter district overall will be developed (with retail, hotels, housing or other uses), how it coincides with the building of a new streetcar lin along the district's northern edge, and whether adjacent properties like the Portland Public Schools facility (also just north of the RQ) might be incorporated into the master plan.

But taking months behind mostly closed doors (the Citizen Advisory Committee not withstanding) isn't the same thing as inaction. The good news is that this summer the mayor, as well as the city's Rose Garden master planner, Michael McCulloch, and even yours truly will be presenting the Coliseum plan at a meeting of the Portland City Club. It will provide the public with a clear sense of why preserving economically viable landmark buildings is in keeping with Portland's quest to become a sustainable capitol, and how a public-private partnership will rejuvenate not only the Coliseum but the entire Rose Quarter development and beyond.

Digital Works, the Beaverton company, is probably right that Memorial Coliseum's remarkably open interior -- a building four city blocks in size resting on just four columns -- would be ideal for adding four floors of studios and offices. The thing is, a building that vast in volume would be able to hold just about anything. In that way, over the past two years the Glass Palace has acted as a kind of blank canvass onto which business hungry developers or circus impressarios can project their most ambitious or wild dreams.

But it's time to end the idea generation stage. It reminds me of an article I wrote for a business magazine in 2007 called "How to Nurture New Ideas". Idea gathering was just the first stage. Next came the need to filter those ideas and, finally, to field test the best one.

Memorial Coliseum was built in 1960 as a multi-purpose arena. It has hosted concerts by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Luciano Pavarotti and Bob Dylan. Basketball history like the 1965 NCAA Championship and the 1977, 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals has been played inside its glassy confines (a curtain at the top of the seating bowl temporarily blocking the light). The Dalai Lama and Barack Obama have spoken there. More importantly, though, it is home today to myriad events from Winterhawks hockey to the Dew Sports Tour to religious gatherings, school graduations and Veterans' Day celebrations. It's a beautiful, utterly unique work of architecture that remains vital to the community. It represents not just the best of our grandparents' generation, but, in its restoration, the best of Portland today. Whether you come from Beaverton or Belmont Street, whether you're seeking a sound studio or a waterpark, it's time to look somewhere else for a single-use building that could be built anywhere but happens to fit inside a city landmark erroneously open for consideration. It's time to commit to Memorial Coliseum. Luckily the truth, like the building, is transparent: all you have to do is open its curtain to see the light.

Last night on TNT, after the Portland Trail Blazers lost Game 2 of their playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks, popular yet controversial commentator and former Hall of Fame player Charles Barkley had something to say not only about the Blazers' chances against the Mavericks going forward in this seven-game series, but also about the two buildings the Portland team has called home.

Barkley, who has been critical of the Blazers in the past, was unequivocally praising of Portland's fans and the home-court advantage they create. Despite Portland's being down 2-0 in the series, Barkley said he expects the series to go six or seven games. "I've always said, they have the best home court in the NBA ... they still have the best fans, in my opinion, in the NBA," Barkley said.

However, Barkley didn't stop with his basketball analysis. He also got in a few words about the architecture. Barkley talked about how much he liked playing in Memorial Coliseum. "That building, that was the best place to play in the NBA," he said.

The Rose Garden, on the other hand, Barkley called "that big ol' mausoleum."

In reporting Barkley's comments in The Oregonian, sportswriter Mike Tokito offered some commentary of his own, but it turned out to be arguably less astute in this case (I like Tokito's reporting otherwise) than the man formerly known as the "Round Mound of Rebound", Barkley.

"It was great -- when it was packed," Tokito writes. "You go in there for one of the Blazers' throwback preseason games, when the building is half full and the basketball spotty, and it hits you just how outdated the old Glass Palace it [sic]."

How fitting that there was a typo in Tokito's sentence about the Glass Palace being outdated. Because it's about as outdated as a vintage 1960 Corvette. When I wrote the Corvette comparison on Twitter earlier today, another Oregonian sports reporter, Ken Goe, suggested it was more like a 1960 Rambler.

Goe has certainly been to the Coliseum hundreds of times, and I've enjoyed his writing for years. But I wonder how often he's been in the building with the curtain open. It was literally stuck in the closed position for decades, keeping the building from showing its wonders. Or do sportswriters just not care about an architectural wonder - the only interior arena in the world with a 360 degree view like this? Are they always focused solely on the action inside? Somehow there's got to be a way to articulate that the Coliseum is Bill Russell and the Rose Garden is Darko Milicic.

As Barkley clearly understands, Memorial Coliseum actually fells less outdated than the Rose Garden, even though the Rose Garden was built more than three decades later. The Coliseum, as its knickname indicates, is all about transparency and simple elegance. The Rose Garden, a gargantuan concrete monolith, seems as if it was designed by Fred Flintstone. It's more fortress than people's arena. Even somebody who matriculated at Auburn like Mr. Barkley can tell that.

Obviously Charles Barkley is no architecture afficionado or expert, yet that's precisely why his coments are worthy of noting.

During the battle to save Memorial Coliseum in 2009 and 2010, opponents of the building's preservation often tried to marginalize its supporters as elitists. They used phrases like "a small band of architects" to describe the preservation campaigners. City Council member Randy Leonard described the Coliseum as an "ugly Costco" in a ham-fisted attempt at cynical populism. Talking heads on local radio like Dwight Jaynes suggested Coliseum preservationists were naive, as if they didn't understand that progress meant wrecking balls.

But the misinformation tactics and the folksy patronizing didn't work. The building is poised to be restored as a complimentary arena to the Rose Garden that helps revitalize the entire Rose Quarter district. And the Coliseum restoration isn't happening in a vacuum. Portland has long sought to establish itself as a 21st century capitol of sustainability and progressive transit and pedestrian-oriented planning. As a new streetcar rolls along NE Broadway in the years ahead, the Rose Quarter can orient itself there by transforming its above-ground parking garages, with the restored Coliseum gleaming again as a people's arena that is open to the world, not a cemented mausoleum.

Barkley's comments help pop a bubble of reverse-elitism that doggedly has accompanied the Coliseum debate. You don't need a fancy architecture degree to see that a gleaming Glass Palace trumps a concrete mausoleum. And the best cities, like Portland, protect their great buildings more than their eyesore garages. The best cities, where people want to move and visit and spend their money, are collections of the best contributions of each generation, and Memorial Coliseum, whether one favors mid-20th Century modernism, is a marvel of its time: as simple as a concrete bowl in a glass box, with a bounty of natural light transforming arena design in a way that prefigures today's retractible-roof stadiums by decades. What's more, the building stands as a tribute to the veterans of Oregon, especially those who gave their lives in World War II and Korea, the conflicts predating Memorial Coliseum's construction. The Glass Palace wasn't highfalutin design for intellectuals, but the simplest of light filled structures: a symbol of the transformation after the war from darkness to light.

Thirty three years ago, my mom boycotted Philadelphia brand cream cheese. It was June of 1977, and the Trail Blazers were playing the Philadelphia 76ers for the NBA championship. I thought of my mom yesterday at the memorial service for Maurice Lucas at Memorial Coliseum, not because she was a big basketball fan, but because she wasn't. See, that's the impact the Blazers' championship team had back then on Portland. Winning the title wasn't just a sports achievement, but a watershed cultural moment for the city.

Admittedly, this is a post about a man first and architecture a distant second. But the experience of saying goodbye to Maurice Lucas in the building where the Blazers won that championship seemed abundantly fitting, not only because of the history made there in 1977 but because, in its expansive volumes of glass and light, Memorial Coliseum has a powerful spiritual quality. After all, it was designed as a memorial to veterans, a place where 360 degrees of glass view symbolized the overcoming of loss by opening yourself up to the sky.

Lucas was more than just a player on the Blazers' championship team. He was more than just the leading scorer in that historic six-game series against the 76ers. Lucas was, as current Blazers' coach Nate McMillan said in his remarks at yesterday's memorial, "a mighty man." He had a reputation in the 1970s as one of the toughest players in the league, but Lucas was no bully. "He bullied bullies," McMillan added.

Memorial Coliseum concourse (photo by Brian Libby)

When Lucas came to Portland, the Blazers had Bill Walton, perhaps the greatest passing center in the history of the game. But Walton was fragile and the team, in coach Jack Ramsay's words (also at yesterday's memorial), "was soft." Lucas transformed the Trail Blazers, not just in the win-loss column (the team had never made the playoffs before he arrived), but in in their sense of what was possible. The '77 Blazers squad became known not just as that year's champion, but the kind of selfless squad of role players and passers that made old-school basketball purists like Bob Knight swoon. At the same time, the big power forward was known to most who knew him as exceptionally gentle, not just for a basketball player but compared to anyone.

As it happens, the '77 Blazers were a special squad in a way that still resonates today: they were great collaborators. In Portland we don't have the financial capital of neighboring cities like Seattle and San Francisco. We don't have the rich diversity or media attention of places like New York or Los Angeles. But there is a culture of collaboration in Portland that is distinctive, and that enables our other key trait: innovation. Trail blazing.

Inspiring, moving and enriching as the Lucas memorial services was, one disappointment I experienced was seeing the Coliseum's curtain closed. After all, many of the most celebrated houses of worship designed and built in our time, such as Philip Johnson's Crystal Cathedral in California, Tadao Ando Church of the Light in Osaka or even some of Pietro Belluschi's churches here in Portland, make natural light a central ingredient of the experience. But a Trail Blazers executive explained to me shortly before the Lucas memorial that they'd chosen to close the Coliseum curtain because of the extensive video and photographs planned for the service. Had the curtain been open, it would have been harder to see the screen.

The incorporation of multimedia is actually one of the other major trends in ecclesiastical design. Increasingly it's not the sculptural quality of the interior or exterior architecture that acts as a transformative, spiritual experience, but instead the use of video, pictures and other imagery. I think of a modest church in my hometown of McMinnville that a few years ago renovated the former tri-cinema complex. They made a house of worship out of a concrete box that was a movie theater. The only exterior change was a faux-historic awning added out front. I've always wondered if they retained the projection booths.

Jack Ramsay at Maurice Lucas memorial service (photo by Brian Libby)

So in a certain respect, the Lucas funeral demonstrates a prime dilemma of designing contemporary worship spaces: what part of the experience, the brick and mortar or the virtual, is meant to help lift your soul?

Meanwhile, despite the sad reality that the great Maurice Lucas left us way too soon, we can all give thanks for the fact that he, like so many, embraced Portland when given the opportunity. And while attending the Lucas memorial in Memorial Coliseum helped give the moment a special resonance, Lucas himself was the man of the hour, reminding us to bully the bullies. And if I ate bagels, I'd have mine today without the cream cheese in Big Luke's honor.

As game time neared on Monday night, a bright early evening sunset bathed Memorial Coliseum with light. Fans poured into the 50-year-old arena to see basketball, but they did not abandon the picturesque sight of the sunset over downtown Portland by walking inside.

It was a losing effort for Rip City in this exhibition game against the Utah Jazz, with Deron Williams and company jumping out to a 7-0 early lead and winning by nine points. Even so, the mood inside the building was one of casual fun. Longtime Blazers radio announcer and emcee Bill Schonely sang "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" after explaining to the crowd that 2010 is the 50th anniversary of Memorial Coliseum - "and it's a veterans Memorial Coliseum," he added, indicating that the entire building is the memorial: not just the plaques outside.

Memorial Coliseum Monday night (photo by Brian Libby)

No doubt the building remains in disrepair. Nothing is structurally wrong, but the routine maintenance the city and the Blazers might conceivably have pursued years ago is still waiting to be done. There is an unnecessary second glass wall at the entrance blocking views of the bowl. There is crass cross bracing on the outer west side of the arena. Yet as basketball fans enjoyed an NBA game in what may be the world's only arena with a 360-degree glass view, it was easy to see how special Memorial Coliseum is, and to envision it as the centerpiece of the Rose Garden's future.

Outside the Coliseum after the game, the building glowed like a jewel box. Nearby, surface parking garages along Broadway and Interstate did just the opposite, acting as vacuums of energy and aesthetics. Last night it was clear as ever, standing in the Rose Quarter after dark, that the key to activating this parcel is to make everything on the ground just that: active. Let's bury the parking underground and surround the Coliseum and Rose Garden with greenery, with small local businesses, and with housing. Let's not dismantle the glowing jewel box but address the stacks of concrete and carbon monoxide beside it.

Memorial Coliseum concourse (photos by Brian Libby)

Meanwhile, though, Monday night was a moment to stop and savor the survival of one of the most unique, beautiful and historic buildings built in Portland or the United States during the 20th century. And as Bill Schonely reminded us, it was a moment to remember and honor our veterans by letting the Glass Palace glow.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In an effort to make Portland Architecture a multi-contributor site, the following is a guest post by William Macht, adjunct professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. Macht is also a member of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee assembled by Mayor Sam Adams and the Portland Development Commission to address the Rose Quarter and Memorial Coliseum. (The SAC's next meeting is September 28.)

As you'll see, Macht is critical of the development agreement that exists between the Blazers and the city, but supportive of Mayor Adams' defense of Memorial Coliseum.

If you'd like to submit a guest post to Portland Architecture, email editor Brian Libby at brianlibby@hotmail.com.

To understand the right course for the Coliseum and the Rose Quarter, one needs to remember Santayana’s famous dictum, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Mayor Adams seems to be on a course to do so.

In 1960, Mayor Terry Schrunk and the Council hired leading national architect Gordon Bunshaft and his SOM firm, who designed an innovative building with a roof that covers 3.25 city blocks and is supported by only four columns topped with ball bearings that allow it to flex. Its 60’-high glass curtain walls yield spectacular views across the river to downtown from its concourse, which is democratically placed in the center of the stadium, so that those in the most and least expensive seats meet in the middle, unlike the windowless Rose Garden whose seating and services are economically stratified.

Memorial Coliseum (photo by Julius Schulman, from the book Modernism Rediscovered)

Mayor Schrunk and Council gave the City a precious multipurpose gift to be used for a wide variety of public purposes. Unlike what some would have us believe, the Coliseum was not built for the Trailblazers who would not exist for another decade. Nor was it built for private pro-fit. A public entity, MERC, that now runs the Convention, Performing Arts and EXPO centers, ran it in the public interest for over 30 years.

Shortly after Paul Allen, then reputedly the world’s second richest man, acquired the Blazers in 1988 for $70 million [now valued by Forbes at $338 million], he sought public support to build a new stadium for his team. He convinced the City to put up $45 million, which he matched in what was termed a “public-private partnership”, to build the Rose Garden that he would own. A consortium of bondholders led by TIAA-CREF financed the balance with 8.99% bonds that Allen refused to personally guarantee.

In February 2004, after interest rates had fallen sharply and his team was doing poorly, Paul Allen defaulted on the bonds and put his Oregon Arena Corporation [OAC] into voluntary bankruptcy to escape the then $198 million debt. Having lost the Rose Garden to the creditors, Allen went into bankruptcy court and offered $90 million to buy it back, and did so in 2007. While the repurchase price has not been revealed, Allen forced the creditors to take an apparent loss of over $100 million.

In this “public-private partnership” with the City, Allen insisted on another public contribution, effectively a 30-year non-competition operating agreement through Allen’s OAC management of the Coliseum, as well as the Rose Garden.

Although the deal on its face was structured to look very favorable for the City, since the city gets 60% of net income from the Coliseum, and the Blazers must pick up any operating losses, when one looks at the whole deal, it emasculates the Coliseum as a City asset. Under this arrangement, if the Blazers stage an event in the Coliseum they get to keep 40%, but if they schedule the same event in the Rose Garden, they keep 100%. As rational economic beings, they profit most by putting just enough in the Coliseum to keep it close to breakeven, so they need not pay operating losses and can reap the larger returns in the Rose Garden.

Rose Quarter and environs (image courtesy William Macht)

And because the City must pay any capital repairs and improvements to the Coliseum, it has not accumulated reserves to pay for them. Deferred maintenance at the Coliseum makes it less competitive, a circumstance that is in the Blazers’ economic interest. Apparently, Allen had done the same thing at the Rose Garden because when Allen lost ownership of it, his company insisted that the creditors invest $40 million in renovation to make it what it called “a first class facility.”

Despite the Coliseum operating agreement, and allegations that the Coliseum is a money-loser that should be demolished (which the Blazers were happy to endorse in the 2001 Rose Quarter plan) the City has actually realized a modest profit there. Using business accounting, the city has made $3.7 million in the last 10 years, even though that includes three years of the bankruptcy and three years of the Great Recession. Yet when I pointed this out recently on OPB’s Think Out Loud, Allen’s business manager had the temerity to say that it was “the City’s good deal” that was the reason that Allen had to declare bankruptcy, somehow equating the annual $380,000 average city profit with $198 million of defaulted Blazers’/OAC debt.

So the real problem with the Coliseum is not its physical structure, but rather its deal structure. Despite claiming to have lost money managing the Coliseum through OAC [now PAM], Blazer president Larry Miller stated “The current agreement is also very important to our business model, so any changes to the agreement will need to add significant benefits to PAM. At present, it is difficult to envision changes to the agreement that would fully protect interests vital to PAM…PAM reserves the right to decide in its sole discretion whether it will agree to any such changes.”

Without PAM profits, that ‘business model’ which PAM seeks to protect must be the non-competition agreement protecting the Blazers’ economic interests in the Rose Garden. The non-competition agreement has now been in effect for over 17 years, longer than a patent, and its continuance will preclude any other proposal, as well as optimization of the profit and community potential for the City.

Despite repeated requests, throughout the yearlong planning process the PDC and the Blazers/PAM have failed to produce operating income and expense data for the Coliseum, programmatic history and other data of the type normally published by operators of publicly-owned arenas. PAM has withheld such information on the stated ground that its disclosure would “reduce the competitiveness of the Coliseum as a facility”. Yet publication of more detailed data by the public owners of the Spokane Arena, for example, has not harmed its competitiveness. It is logical to expect quite the reverse to occur; that is, publication of lower event rental fees for the Coliseum would reduce the competitiveness of the Rose Garden, which PAM apparently seeks to prevent by non-disclosure.

Reasonable arguments can be made that the operating agreement extension option rights in 2013 and 2018 are extinguished by the event of default caused by the voluntary bankruptcy, and/or, that the anti-competition agreement’s 30-year potential term is void as against public policy. Even if the legal challenge did not succeed, through the voluntary bankruptcy and anti-competitive behavior, the Blazers have proved themselves to be unfit private partners in any future public-private partnership.

Under its 1992 development agreement with the City, negotiated under Mayor Clark but amended several times when Mayor Adams was chief-of-staff to Mayor Katz, the Blazers were given what are erroneously referred to as “development rights” to the Coliseum and portions of the Rose Quarter, and which are scheduled to expire November 24th of this year. In fact, these are actually “Development Rights of First Proposal” since any Blazer development proposal, even if exercised, could be simply rejected by the City without consequence to it, which would be free to solicit proposals from other developers.

In addition there are many preconditions to any rights, many of which have not been met. The City has not declared the area "available for non-public use development", nor could it because it has not examined the need for public-use development, which is defined in the agreement to include "recreation." On that score alone, the Obletz MARC proposal, and others are ripe for real consideration.

Nor have the Blazers submitted a proposal with adequate specificity for review. In fact, the mayor has said publicly, and been quoted, that the Jumptown proposal floated earlier was “terrible.”

Furthermore, the agreement requires the Blazers to develop and submit a “master plan”, which the Blazers have not done. The "master plan" required to be submitted by OAC/PAM for this proposal was in fact the 1992/2001 urban design review done without regard to current conditions a decade later. Nor was it a true development plan and certainly not one prepared by OAC/PAM. Yet it was accepted by the Council in 2001 when Adams was chief-of-staff to Mayor Katz. This legerdemain is not worthy of a public-private partnership in the public interest, nor worthy of the ostensibly transparent public process initiated by the Mayor a year ago.

Under Mayor Adams’ task force, headed personally by the Mayor, the PDC solicited concepts for “repurposing” the Coliseum. Proposals for the rest of the 40-acre Rose Quarter were expressly excluded. From 96 proposals submitted, three proposals were selected for review to be made by a more detailed request for proposals [RFP] from the three. The Mayor aborted the RFP process when he determined that none of the three proposals could be implemented with available resources, as we in the minority had warned, and when his personal effort to meld the three proposals was unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, the Mayor has now announced that he is negotiating with the Blazers/PAM a pre-development agreement, one element of which could be extension of the development rights. In other words, the Mayor is treating the Blazers/PAM as though they were the winners of an RFP competition selected through a public process, entitled to negotiate a new public-private partnership, even though the competition was only for the Coliseum and was, itself, aborted by the Mayor. If the Mayor negotiates a pre-development agreement prior to expiration of the right of first proposal, both the perception and reality of unfairness will be obvious.

Beyond the procedural unfairness lurk the substantive problems of the Coliseum and Rose Quarter that remain unsolved. Nothing is being done to remedy the underlying deal structure that condemns the Coliseum to marginal public use. Nor is anything being done to remedy the complaints of the Coliseum’s major tenant, the Winterhawks regarding the condition of the building. And nothing is being done to determine and undertake those select improvements that could expand and optimize public and private uses of the arena, concourse, meeting rooms and 40,000 SF exhibit hall without reducing the Coliseum’s competitiveness for larger events.

Instead, the Blazers/PAM plan to reduce the seating from 12,000 to about 7,000 seats is a thinly veiled plan to permanently make the Coliseum less competitive with the Rose Garden. There is no public benefit in reducing seating capacity because it is the largest events that are the most profitable. The reduction of seating capacity precludes events like the Davis Cup tournament and full house events like popular concerts, graduations, and the Obama and Nader rallies.

The Blazers justify the reduction contending that fewer seats make the bowl more intimate. Yet without reduction of bowl size, it is difficult to understand how fewer seats and larger holes in the same sized bowl leads to greater intimacy. What is clear is that fewer seats make the Coliseum less competitive with the Rose Garden for larger, more profitable events. A more intimate venue could be done flexibly in a way that preserves the ability to hold larger events, for example through use of a collapsible band shell, curtains or other temporary devices.

Moreover, both the Blazers and the Mayor labor under the illusion that increasing the sports and entertainment functions of the Rose Quarter will solve its underlying problems. In fact, since those uses are primarily event-driven, and mostly occur on some evenings and weekends, further development of such type will exacerbate the crowding during event times and do nothing to complement it during slack times.

The major urban planning problem of the Rose Quarter is that it is disconnected from the urban fabric both programmatically and physically. Go there any time other than event time, most any weekday, and more than 2500 parking spaces will be vacant, garages locked, and there is activity too minimal to even support the succession of retailers and restaurants developed by the Blazers/PAM.

There could be actions that would ameliorate these conditions and begin to bring the Rose Quarter back into the city. A very simple and potentially profitable first step would be to remove the City garages from Blazer control and add them into the SmartPark system to provide needed parking for the Left Bank and other businesses across the street. But until the Mayor and Council let the development right of first proposal expire and challenge/terminate the operating agreement, nothing can change.

The Mayor’s effort to bring the Rose Quarter within the Interstate Urban Renewal Area to absorb large portions of its tax increment funds for an entertainment complex to be developed by urban entertainment center developer Cordish with the Blazers/PAM would be throwing a good deal of money, time and talent toward solution of the wrong problems. It would also take scarce resources away from many potentially viable and needed projects within the Interstate URA.

However, rather than being roundly criticized by the Oregonian editors as having “caved in to a few puffs of pressure – and took razing the Coliseum out of the picture” Mayor Adams should be commended for learning its architectural value and changing his mind. Moreover, no editor has explained the fiscal folly of demolishing the Coliseum, a public asset valued by the county assessor at $57.1 million, that can and does operate profitably 365 days a year for up to 12,000 citizens, in order to spend $55 million of scarce new capital for an open-air stadium for up to 7,000 baseball fans that would host home games on only 70 days during the summer and could not even begin to cover its debt service.

Having intelligently changed his mind on Coliseum demolition, so too should he change it and end negotiation of a pre-development agreement with the Blazers/PAM, and at the same time challenge/terminate the operating agreement.

Mayor Adams has amassed all of the City’s development resources under his control. One wishes that he would use them as wisely as did his predecessor Mayor Terry Schrunk and the Council in 1960 when they had designed and created an innovative and democratic architectural landmark, for public use to benefit diverse segments of the public, in honor of its veterans, and dedicated to service of the public at large, not private monopolistic profit.

Today the Portland Beavers will play their final minor-league baseball game at PGE Park. After playing in our city for the better part of the last century, the franchise by tomorrow will have played its last ballgame here.

But if you read so-called experts like John Canzano of The Oregonian, trying to blame Memorial Coliseum and the efforts of a supposedly few "sentimental architects" for the Beavers' demise, don't be fooled.

It is indeed too bad for the Portland Beavers that they were forced out of their longtime home by the effort to make PGE Park a soccer-only facility without being given a proper home of their own. (Although I say this in full support of the Portland Timbers and their journey to MLS.) As a native Oregonian, I've been watching the Portland Beavers all my life. I saw my first live Beavers game back in 1980. I don't want them to leave.

It's also too bad that owner Merritt Paulson and his close ally at city hall, Commissioner Randy Leonard, attempted to make this issue a Beavers versus Coliseum choice. It never had to be that way. In fact, it never was that way.

Nearly 18 months ago Paulson, Leonard and Mayor Adams floated the proposal to demolish Memorial Coliseum for a minor league baseball stadium. The response was abundantly clear from the public: Don't do it. This was not simply the will of a few architects. No matter how many times Leonard, Canzano or anyone else try to pin that untruth to the wall, it won't stick. A broad spectrum of Portlanders made themselves loudly heard in support of a historic building that was built as a tribute to our veterans, and which is a one-of-a-kind building in the world.

There was never any organized action from the Portland Beavers fan base. No Beavers fans came to City Hall to make their opinions heard. No Beavers fans showed up last year when the Rose Quarter stadium plan was introduced to cheer for the idea.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that even by the Portland Beavers' own estimates, attendance would have gone down a few years after building and moving into the new stadium. [The Oregonian argued the opposite in an editorial this morning, but evidently they forgot to look at the team's own numbers.]

Merritt Paulson tried to find a home for the Beavers anywhere else in the entire Portland metropolitan area, and to his credit. But nobody wanted them. Beaverton backed out. Clackamas backed out. Lents backed out. Vancouver backed out. The story here isn't just that the Beavers couldn't convince Portland to tear down the Coliseum. It's that they couldn't convince even any of its suburbs.

If the Portland area really wants the Portland Beavers back, there will be a genuine effort to build them a stadium on a site that makes sense for everyone, or a least a site that doesn't draw such ire.

The saddest irony of historic preservation is that societies often want to save the 100-year-old building but then act like it's crazy to worry about the 50-year-old one. Memorial Coliseum exemplifies a whole generation of buildings constructed in the 1950s and '60s that are becoming historic and qualifying for historic-preservation protection under the law but for which society hasn't come to see their status as historic. Most early post-World War II buildings will be torn down, and that's alright. But the very best buildings should be preserved, especially if they still retain a very viable function. That's abundantly true with Memorial Coliseum, for it is a design unmatched anywhere: a masterpiece of midcentury modern architecture, one offering a 360-degree glass view of the city that does not exist in any other building in the world. Cities at their best are collections of great buildings from every era, and the Coliseum is mid-20th century architecture at its finest.

It's too bad that The Oregonian has devoted page after page after page, be it in editorial or column or regular reporting, to the loss of the Beavers and to the Rose Quarter process itself without ever talking to readers about what's great about Memorial Coliseum and why its preservation matters. The Oregonian has utterly failed this story, and John Canzano is only the latest.

Go ahead, mourn the Portland Beavers' departure. I do. But don't be fooled by those telling you we'd have been better off tearing down a Coliseum that belongs to and represents us all just so several hundred baseball fans can sit in a half-empty ballpark built on the ashes of the best of us.

When the effort to tear down Memorial Coliseum was rekindled recently by a member of City Council and the Portland Beavers' owner, one claim made was that veterans of Oregon are interested in a new memorial being erected and thus are alright with the arena being torn down.

Although no one can ever claim to speak for all veterans, just as no other group ever speaks completely unanimously, an op-ed in Sunday's Oregonian re-affirms that the majority of local veterans and their leadership are behind a Coliseum restoration.

"Veterans in Oregon were so fortunate 50 years ago to have a nationally recognized community building dedicated to them," wrote Tony Stacy, Trudy Ruesser, Harley Wedel and Chris Hoskinson, a quartet of Oregon veterans' advocates. "This building was simply extraordinary. Four city blocks held up by four columns. Sixty-foot Oregon timber beams holding up massive expanses of glass overlooking our city. Memorial Coliseum was a gem that looked to the future."

Tony Stacy is on the Rose Quarter Advisory Committee and a Vietnam War veteran. TrudyReusser is the widow of Kenneth Reusser, the most highly decorated Marine pilot in American history. Harley Wedel served in Korea and Chris Hoskinson in Vietnam.

Memorial Coliseum, 2009 (image courtesy Portland Trail Blazers)

"With this building our community gave a very visible, heartfelt thanks to the men and women who served in our armed forces and helped make our country the great place it is," their op-ed continues.

"Those heroes who gave their lives in service had their names carved in stone in quiet courtyards. The coliseum was a living memorial, as well, that celebrated a life of freedom with graduations, events, parades and rallies. It celebrated community, by giving our city a large indoor, naturally lit place to gather."

"Years have gone by. The great honor to our veterans has become sadly neglected. The founding ideas behind the coliseum have been forgotten by most. Like many 50-year-old structures, the building needs significant capital improvements. So, let's fix it!"

The essay goes on to recommend that a "realistic amount of public funds" be committed right away to rejuvenate and enhance the Coliseum.

The veterans of Oregon also are working toward Veterans Day celebration this November that will be a tribute to armed forces members produced by Remembering America's Heroes and including a special light show illuminating the Glass Palace. The celebration will also serve as a 50th birthday party for Memorial Coliseum, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

"Let's have the rejuvenation plan ready to go by then, and let's light up the coliseum for the city to see," the veterans quartet concludes. "Next year, let's start construction to make Memorial Coliseum a tribute to our fallen and living veterans once again. And then, after we have done our work, we can proudly rededicate to our veterans a rejuvenated, shining Memorial Coliseum."

Memorial Coliseum, 2009 (image courtesy Portland Trail Blazers)

Although I'm admittedly liberal politically, I am also the proud grandson of two World War II veterans, one of whom landed at Normandy and the other fought in the Pacific. I think of them when I'm inside Memorial Coliseum with its curtain open. It's easy for those outside the architectural profession to find such talk elitist or highfalutin, but it's really easy to communicate the power of symbolism here. The bounty of natural illumination and the transparency represent how the evil is defeated by exposing it to the light. Even if you're a pacifist and resist such moralist symbolism, it's easy to see how such transparency and light represent hope.

This kind of local landmark, one tying the generations and memorializing the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents, is irreplaceable. A minor-league baseball stadium, the threat to Memorial Coliseum, can be built anywhere - that is, if the team's community supports it. (And given the Beavers' small attendance numbers, that doesn't seem to be the case.) Hopefully the Portland Beavers won't have to leave town. I first saw them play as an eight-year-old kid. On my bookshelf is a baseball signed by the San Diego Chicken obtained at a Beavers' game as a 5th grader. But cannibalizing a building like this for the couple thousand who fill a portion of PGE Park each summer is not the way to save them or the Rose Quarter.

Memorial Coliseum (photo by Julius Schulman), from Modernism Rediscovered, published by Taschen

There's an old legend about Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. But what if a member of the Roman senate was actually lighting the flames?

That's how I would characterize a report in Wednesday's Vancouver Columbian newspaper that Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard has renewed his personal campaign to demolish Memorial Coliseum.

The story also re-affirms the close relationship between Leonard and millionaire Merritt Paulson, son of George W. Bush's former treasury secretary, Henry Robert Paulson, and owner of the Portland Beavers and Portland Timbers franchises.

Leonard told the Columbian's Brian T. Smith that "he re-proposed an idea last week to Portland’s City Council about tearing down the Coliseum and building a new, state-of-the-art facility for the Beavers."

"Leonard’s vision for the venue mirrors one recently described by Paulson," Smith adds, "an open-air ballpark located near the waterfront in downtown Portland, surrounded by restaurants and community-oriented businesses. The 7,000-10,000 seat stadium would complement the Rose Quarter, and provide almost year-round sports entertainment when paired with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers."

“I applaud Randy Leonard’s unwavering commitment to keeping baseball in Portland,” Paulson said Tuesday. “He has been a staunch supporter of our efforts all the way through this process.”

“It’s getting down to the wire,” Leonard continued. “And what it takes is just the will of two more council members to stand up to the raging architects...“I’m just flummoxed that the council would be persuaded by that lobbying effort. It’s the least persuasive lobbying effort I’ve been subjected to in 20 years of politics.”

Notice that Leonard used the term "lobbying effort." You know what? I bet a millionaire like Paulson can afford a slicker, more substantial lobbying effort than a grassroots group of ordinary citizens.

Let's recap for the Commisioner's sake.

Memorial Coliseum was dedicated in 1960 as a memorial to war veterans - not just the plaque outside but the entire building. Veterans of Oregon are united in efforts to preserve the building. Leonard argued to the newspaper that veterans are coming around to the fact that the building is a terrible memorial. But that's a twisting of the truth. The memorial, like the rest of the building, is in disrepair because the city hasn't engaged in proper upkeep of the building. But renovating Memorial Coliseum, including a re-designed veterans memorial, would accomplish this without destroying the gift that our grandparents' generation gave to the city for permanent keeping.

Architecturally, the arena is one-of-a-kind in the world, with the only major indoor spectator facility that boasts 360-degree views of the city including the downtown skyline and Willamette River. It was designed by the most accomplished and renowned American architecture firm of the 20th century: Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, with legendary designer Gordon Bunshaft behind the design.

Know what Leonard thinks of Memorial Coliseum? He calls it a Costco. An elected official representing a city of millions has indicated that he sees no difference between landmark modern architecture and big-box retail. By this rationale, Leonard would also see no difference between a vintage Porsche and a new Chrylser PT Cruiser.

Cultural history alone wouldn't be enough to save a building without it having matchless architecture, but as it happens, many of the most significant cultural moments in the history of the city happened at Memorial Coliseum: The Beatles' only concert here. The Trail Blazers' 1977 NBA championship. Concerts by Luciano Pavarotti and Bob Dylan. The campaign of President Obama. And lots, lots more.

Saving the arena has become a matter of importance to the green building community as well. Tearing down a historic arena is not sustainable.

That the arena is empty is also a fallacy. Memorial Coliseum drew over 150 events last year, even more than the adjacent Rose Quarter. A minor league baseball stadium on the site, even besides the irreparable destruction of landmark architecture it would cause, would never draw as many events.

Leonard has routinely attempted to characterize support for Memorial Coliseum's preservation as coming from only a small group of architects. Au contraire, Monsieur! The United States Green Building Council (America's foremost green building organization), the National Trust for Historic Preservation (the nation's largest historic preservation entity), and the American Institute of Architects (the US's largest group of architects) have all explicitly called for Memorial Coliseum's preservation. So have the Portland Trail Blazers and a wide grassroots consortium of ordinary Portland citizens. Leonard should know, too. Many of them testified to City Council in support of the Coliseum's preservation.

One can agree with Leonard and Paulson about one thing: It's too bad that the Portland Beavers don't have a home and will likely have to be sold to an out-of-town buyer. That's the result of Paulson's other team, the Portland Timbers, making the city-owned PGE Park a soccer-only facility. It will be great to have the Timbers in Major League Soccer, and it would be nice to have the Beavers in town too. But destroying one of Portland's major landmarks is not the way to solve this impasse.

If Paulson and Leonard really are thinking only about saving the Beavers' presence in Portland, why not find a site anywhere else in the entire Portland metropolitan area for the Beavers and the approximately 2,000 to 3,000 per-game spectators the team draws?

Also, Portland is seeking to become a world-class metropolitan city that attracts people from all over the world. Does the phrase "minor-league baseball" seem like the way to do that? We may not be New York, but we're not Toledo, Ohio either.

It was 15 months ago that a minor-league baseball stadium was proposed for the Coliseum site. When that happened, there wasn't just opposition to the plan. There was an overwhelming avalanche of people coming out of the woodworks to speak up for the Coliseum. We, not only in the Friends of Memorial Coliseum but all Portlanders, are prepared to oppose the Leonard-Paulson alliance until our last breath is exhaled. Memorial Coliseum isn't just glass and steel, but possesses something we do: the very DNA of Portland, Oregon: its history and its expression of hope for the future, and how it exemplifies how design and creativity are foundations of our city fabric and its people.

This is by no means an attempt to vilify Commissioner Randy Leonard or Mr. Paulson. Particularly in Leonard's case, he is a big-hearted man with a passion for Portland. I would agree with him on other issues like a bond measure for the Fire Bureau, or going after restaurateurs with condemnable buildings. The Commissioner just happens to have some kind of vendetta or utter blindness when it comes to evaluating the continuing value in and love for Memorial Coliseum. But that's where the rest of us come in: to stand up for the great Portland places that make us who we are.

Thankfully if Commissioner Leonard is committed to the wrecking ball, the other four members of City Council are committed to honoring and preserving this local landmark. And luckily it takes at least three votes to make a majority, and I'm yet to see how Leonard even has two.

I wonder if the Pittock Mansion, Central Library or the Portland Art Museum ever faced such attacks in generations past.

Last night's Bright Lights talk about the Rose Quarter development, hosted by Portland Monthlyeditor Randy Gragg and featuring Mayor Adams and three members of the Trail Blazers team, was both encouraging and, at times, a little baffling.

The talk began with an explanation from Gragg about why the two non-Blazer finalists for the Memorial Coliseum renovation - the VMAAC (Veterans' Memorial Arts & Athletic Center) and the MARC (Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex) - were not participating. "For tonight it’s both broader and more specific," he said. Gragg mentioned three decisions coming up that needed vetting: the expiration of the Blazers’ Coliseum development rights in 2011, whether Urban Renewal Area funds from other districts should be used here, and whether the Convention Center URA should be reshaped in 2011 to include the Rose Quarter.

Gragg then invited Portland State University professor and historian Carl Abbot to give a brief refresher talk on the 100 years of history that predated construction of the Rose Quarter. This parcel has always had value as high ground, Abbot explained: a peninsula of higher land between Sullivan’s gulch and the bottom lowlands. “It was one of the few places where dry land came down to the river on the east side.”

Then, with the addition of streetcar lines in 1904, the future Rose Quarter area became a cross section of two principal arterials: Broadway running east-west and Interstate Avenue (then Portland's principal highway) running north-south. The Broadway Bridge construction in 1912 made Broadway a commercial corridor. As Portland developed a working waterfront in the 20th century, the mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhood of Lower Albina flourished here. Approaching and during World War II, industrial jobs helped Portland's African-American population grow by tenfold, from two thousand to 20,000. After the war, like most American cities, Portland added freeways (Interstate 5) and huge urban renewal projects (Memorial Coliseum). These had value, but at the great price of destroying a once thriving neighborhood.

I've been to several Gragg-hosted panel discussions over the years, and they almost always start with each of three or four speakers giving presentations, and then a discussion finally at the end.

So next Mayor Adams was introduced to the crowd, but he had a message of his own to deliver before sitting down with Gragg.

First, the mayor paid tribute. "It’s with a great amount of reverence and humility that we have to approach this," Adams said. "Reverence in that this was once a functioning neighborhood…and reverence for the fact that this part of the city includes the displacement of African American Portlanders who had not much of a toe hold of any sort of security in this city for very long—except for this neighborhood."

Some of Adams' following comments were the most controversial of the evening. The mayor asserted that he was not blindsided by opposition to demolishing Memorial Coliseum for a baseball stadium last year.

"When we were looking to site a new triple-A ballpark, I was a strong advocate for it to go in the Rose Quarter," he said. "It was really a great place to put it. But when our charrette of people got together and said the only way to site it was to tear down Memorial Coliseum, I said after two days…that this would be very controversial, but I wanted to honor their work and get the word out for public input."

“I did not support tearing down Memorial Coliseum but I thought the discussion was a good and healthy one.”

Many of us were shocked that the Mayor argued this was all part of his master plan. Gragg followed up by asking, "The process the way you portrayed it was very intentional and methodical. But you were a bit blindsided by the reaction against putting the stadium there, weren't you?"

"No," Adams insisted. "If you were there at the charrette…I told people in the room this was going to be controversial. It was as contentious as I predicted it would be."

I'm sure the mayor and his advisors are smarter than me when it comes to politics; Adams has a limitless passion for ideas. But I'd have advised the mayor to demonstrate a bit more humility about the journey of the past 15 months. We've all had a learning experience, and I would bet that includes the mayor as well.

Gragg then asked Adams about the now-controversial recent decision to dive into generating three finalists for the Coliseum commission only to set aside two of the finalists. The Mayor indicated that this, too, was all part of the plan.

"Absolutely," he said. "It was important that we only get it to the point of being half baked because we needed the ideas of the district to inform the ideas about the coliseum and do diligence on what was really realistic for the future of this building."

I'm not saying Mayor Adams is wrong or that he's lying. But his version of the last year and a half of wrestling and debate over Memorial Coliseum is very different from the memory that most of us have. That Adams was supportive of the Coliseum all along is a very shocking revelation that's difficult to believe. But the important thing is that he supports it now.

"There have been press reports about it being halted," Adams continued. "But we’re going to take the most inspired but doable ideas out of Memorial Coliseum, look at the district and come back to the Coliseum. I realize it’s tough to track. This kind of negotiation usually happens behind the scenes. At one time people were surprised when it was going to be a big box. One of the lessons I learned was it needed to happen in the daylight, to look at all the ideas and take them seriously."

“I told [the Stakeholder Advisory Committee] at the beginning we were going to come up with some half baked ideas of the Memorial Coliseum and let a discussion of the Rose Quarter inform the discussion about the Coliseum and vice versa. You’re going to have to cover the same waterfront of issues if this is going to go forward. You couldn’t do one in isolation, but they were so big you had to look at them apart.”

"Because there’s so much emotional attachment to the Coliseum and the Rose Quarter, for some, that passion presented itself with people with very firm and confident ideas on what the future for Memorial Coliseum should be and what the future of the rq should be. In my time I’ve heard ideas that have run the gamut. So I knew it was important to let people present, and that the good, doable ideas, no matter where they came from, we’d try to move those ideas forward. That’s why we had such an odd, open process move forward."

Rose Quarter map, courtesy Portland Development Commission

Talking about the Rose Quarter moving forward, Adams had some potentially encouraging signs. "Inspired by the Coliseum itself, it’s an opportunity for us to have a stand up neighborhood that is modern in its form," he explained of tentative design plans. "It’s a chance for us to break from the re-creation of past forms and create a new form that’s inspired by the Coliseum itself."

Considering that the Blazers' plans for the district, tagged "Jumptown", seemed by their first released rendering to be built in a cloying neo-historic style, the team's plans have come a long way. But the Blazers, for all their faults, have one thing over Adams: they freely admitted to changing their thinking according to public input.

"We’ve changed our approach from what we initially thought about the coliseum and the larger district," Isaac said. "But we’re still in the middle of this and we’re still looking for input."

"If there’s one message that we would want you to take home with you tonight, it’s that this district can be whatever you want and we want it to be. The potential hasn’t been captured yet. We want the district to reflect how Portland is changing. It’s got to embody the values that make Portland different."

Isaac also argued for the Coliseum to remain an arena, not for architectural reasons but for business ones.

"We feel like an arena function is a benefit to this community that is very little known. About half a million people a year come into the coliseum. We still have those graduations, and winter hawk games. And we bring major events to town because we have two arenas. It functions well and brings activity to the community. We wanted to add to it rather than to take away."

Isaac was then joined by Rick Potestio, the ultra-talented Portland architect who may be leading the Blazers' Rose Quarter design plans long with Nike's Tinker Hatfield and Baltimore-based firm Design Collective (Cordish's longtime partner).

Host Randy Gragg at Bright Lights. Photo by Brian Libby

“The Rose Quarter’s potential is based on its connection to the rest of the city," Potestio said. "It's the best located opportunity the city has to bring a vibrant neighborhood into connection with our waterfront.” He went on to emphasize its connections not just to North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods and the Lloyd District, but also Chinatown, Old Town and the Pearl District across the river. Most of all, though, he emphasized the river. "This gives an unprecedented opportunity to create a vibrant riverfront experience, something we’ve tried in the rest of the city but have really been yet to achieve," he added. "It has incredible proximity to all modes of transportation. The southern edge is an important intersection of light rail system, the north side will have the first streetcar line on the east side, and the fact that this is a nexus of bike routes is really significant." Potestio has long been an avid cyclist.

"I also imagine a future with high speed rail and water taxies," the architect continued. "High speed rail could be adjacent to if not within the Rose Quarter. "And parks and public spaces need to be an integral aspect. And the Rose Quarter was once part of of city street grid. While it’s not possible to recreate that, we have the opportunity to create a series of blocks and streets that are intimate and human in scale."

The Blazers' chief marketing office, Sarah Mensah, also joined the discussion. She walked the audience through a huge array of ideas being considered for the Rose Quarter: a farmers market, retail pods and food carts (“pop-up retail”), music and arts, local and regional microbreweries & wineries, housing. "We’ve got to figure out to make the rose quarter an accessible and desirable place to live, and not just to visit," she said. "When people live there, they tend to spend time there. The same with office space. It will be a critical component to a mixed use development." She also mentioned one or more hotels.

A skeptic might argue that these are all just seductive keywords: "organic", "local", "brewpubs", "food carts", "river", and that Mensah was just forging a superficial relationship to things that define us.

Something else Mensah said could be even more important: "This does not need to be a single-source developer either. That’ snot traditionally how it’s been in Portland."

Of course the other piece of this puzzle is the Cordish Company, the Baltimore-based developer the Blazers are partnering with on the Rose Quarter development. Cordish has taken a barrage of local criticism based on the company's proclivity for developing chain-oriented places with an antiseptic feel that feels more suburban and mall-like than befits a central urban area. But as Gragg pointed out, Cordish also has designed places more urban and less dissimilar from what Portland wants.

"Which Cordish are we going to get?" Gragg asked Isaac and Mensah.

"They recognize Portland is different from any other market," Isaac answered. "They get that something that worked somewhere else might not work here."

"We get what we deserve," Mensa added. "At the end of the day, the city and PDC are setting the parameters here. We’ve got specific goals in place that we want to follow. We’re comfortable that they want to be successful. The last thing they want to do is invest in a project like this and have it not be accepted by the city in the future."

"I’m not for or against Cordish," Adams said, "but I think we can get a little provincial. Remember it a was local developer that a few years ago wanted to add big-box retail in the Coliseum." He was referring to Brewery Blocks and South Waterfront developer Gerding Edlen.

Ultimately the evening's talk was just that: talk. How the process unfolds from here will be the proof.

Adams, despite perplexing the audience with his claims that he never wanted to tear down the Coliseum, has embraced a contemporary, mixed-use vision for the Rose Quarter that includes a functioning, restored MC that is retained as an arena. That's good - credit to the Mayor for that.

The Blazers say the right things about adding a variety of functions from food carts to plazas to a riverfront with water taxis. For all of Paul Allen's Nixonian isolation, the Portland-based Blazer staff do listen to the community and are rooted here. The organization, to its credit, has also come a long way in its thinking about the district. Yet can we trust the organization to let Rick Potestio's considerable talents lead the way and to deliver on its other promises? Can we get Cordish to develop something contrary to most of their portfolio? It's hard to say. My inclination is to have a blend of trust and skepticism, and to hold all these players accountable every step of the way.

On Monday, July 12, the Bright Lights discussion series from Portland Monthly magazine and the City Club will present a talk about the future of the Rose Quarter, hosted by the magazine's editor, Randy Gragg, and featuring Mayor Sam Adams and Trail Blazers vice president of business development J.E. Isaac.

"Sam will talk about process moving forward. J will talk about their programming concepts for the coliseum and the quarter in concert," Gragg explained in a Thursday phone conversation. "This is intended to be an unofficial kickoff to basically re-examine the problem and what’s on the table in terms of money, what’s on the table in terms of how far they want to go."

So far the city's Portland Development Commission-led process has focused on Memorial Coliseum. But now attention is being turned to the overall district. It's too bad the Coliseum and the Rose Quarter are being looked at separately, but that's one of the many difficulties that have been inherent to the process so far, from a lack of budget consciousness to a discouraging of professional design expertise. But it's encouraging to see the city is finally ready to take a holistic look at the Rose Quarter.

"Basically the Blazers have had the development rights to the Quarter since they built the Rose Garden," Gragg added. "I think this is a bit of a moment of recognizing that it’s not just about the building. It has to work in consort with the rest of the Quarter. Whatever you do with the Coliseum can’t be done in isolation."

Speaking of isolation, it's worth pointing out who won't be a guest of Gragg's for the Monday conversation: the other two finalists besides the Blazers that were selected by the city's Stakeholder Advisory Committee process: the Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex (MARC) and the Veterans Memorial Arts & Athletic Complex (VMAAC). Even though as a staunch Coliseum preservationist I'm glad to see the city possibly moving away from the two plans that would have gutted the building and cost exponentially more than the city can afford, one can certainly see why the MARC and VMAAC proponents would feel angry about being marginalized after all that effort to generate their proposals.

That said, perhaps there is still room for a portion of either the MARC or VMAAC proposals or both - simply in places other than Memorial Coliseum. As I and others have said for over a year now, since the Coliseum was first threatened by a ludicrously ill advised minor league baseball stadium plan, there is huge opportunity to transform the Rose Quarter into a vibrant, mixed-use district: but that opportunity shouldn't begin with ruining the best thing the Rose Quarter has going. Instead, imagine new facilities along the riverfront, or on the site of two giant Rose Quarter above-ground parking garages, or on the site of One Center Court's hideous above-ground parking garage, in the huge exhibition hall underneath the Coliseum's entry plaza.

I also can't help but wonder: the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade extends from OMSI in the south to the edge of the Rose Quarter in the north. Wouldn't it be ideal to extend the Esplanade so it runs past the Steel Bridge and the Rose Quarter, continuing on to at least the Broadway Bridge? This way pedestrians could walk to the district pleasantly from virtually anywhere downtown or in Southeast.

Last week on Portland Arts Watch, Barry Johnson offered some ideas about what the process needs:

First, any urban planning solution to the Rose Quarter's 'dead zone' problem should be part of an overall plan for the area surrounding the Rose Quarter, especially the blocks north of Broadway, along Williams and Vancouver streets, and the Lloyd District. The Rose Quarter needs to be connected to these areas in some way to be successful at anything it attempts to do. Second and related, the neighborhoods nearest the Rose Quarter, including the River District across the Willamette River, needed to be consulted.

For the past year with private development at a near standstill, public projects like the Columbia Crossing bridge and the Rose Quarter have garnered all the more attention. The Columbia Crossing is a disaster waiting to happen, with the process hijacked by state transportation departments and flying in the face of local values. The Rose Quarter could just as easily become a failure - or more accurately, remain a failure - but there is also no reason why it can't be a great success.

It's true that the Portland Development Commission can sometimes be a detrimental force just like state governments are doing with the CRC; the agency has a history of favoring process for process sake - a parade of community members talking rather than an investment in great designers. Even so, at least PDC is of Portland, stocked with people who understand the city and live it every day. The wild card in that sense may become The Cordish Company, the Baltimore developer that the Trail Blazers have so far insisted on making their partner. Would Cordish be able to develop a Rose Quarter that is truly expressive and representative of Portland? It won't happen simply by stocking local businesses in a neo-historic brick building made to ape jazz clubs of a half-century ago. Whomever the developer is, they need talented planners, architects and other designers involved.

We also have to figure out funding. Gragg said Mayor Adams will be largely talking about the process moving forward. Perhaps the biggest aspect of the process will be the question of where the money comes from. The city has a very small amount of budget to devote to the Rose Quarter and the restoration of Memorial Coliseum unless the city is able to draw from urban renewal funds allotted to the Convention Center Urban Renewal Area and/or the Interstate Urban Renewal Area. But it's been an ongoing open question as to what funds will be drawn from where, and what impact the loss of those funds might have on these urban renewal areas.

Another way the City of Portland can bring clarity to the Rose Quarter redevelopment process is to hasten a decision on the future of the Portland Public Schools site that lies just across NE Broadway from the Rose Quarter. Will it be a place where we can build mixed-use housing and a new neighborhood? Because housing is the primary component needed in making the Rose Quarter successful. The problem with the whole area between NE Broadway, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Burnside is that it is both (1) not scaled for pedestrians and (2) not home to much of any pedestrians. We can't change the fact that people coming to the Rose Garden arena for events will usually come in cars, because Trail Blazer games and concerts attract people from all over the region. You can't walk here from Newberg or Washougal, at least not in time for a 7PM tipoff. Yet if the Rose Quarter is to become a successful district, not just during events but when there aren't any, we need to give people reason to be walking here - as in it being where their condos, apartments or even hotel rooms are.

We also need to find a way to find out if the plans being discussed will ever really happen. It's one thing to plan a holistic, vibrant neighborhood with housing and public amenities. It's another to build it. How long will it be before a transformed Rose Quarter plan is implemented? We could be talking several years. At the same time, Memorial Coliseum could be restored starting tomorrow. Upgrading its facilities is a quintessential 'shovel-ready' project even if it doesn't require a shovel.

The Bright Lights discussion will be held, as always, at the Gerding Theater in the Pearl District (SW 11th between Couch and Davis), with doors open at 5:30 and the talk beginning at 6:30pm.

First of all, I'll be the first to admit that I may be way, way more passionate about Blazers basketball than the average person reading this architecture blog.

But it's a funny coincidence that the front page of today's Oregonian leads with a story by Ryan Frank called "Cultivating the Rose Quarter" on the morning after Blazers owner Paul Allen has inexplicably, ruinously, crazily fired general manager Kevin Pritchard, a veritable folk hero to Blazer fans who also is considered by NBA officials across the league as one of the best.

Consider this opening passage about Allen and the Rose Quarter in Frank's article:

Katz and Allen celebrated the team's new $262 million arena. But just as important, executives said, the team planned to dig up nearby parking lots and building restaurants, shops and more.

Seventeen years later, Allen and the Blazers enjoy a successful home court in the Rose Garden. But the surrounding district is still a garden of blacktop."

Clearly the firing of Kevin Pritchard and the ongoing issue of redeveloping the Rose Quarter are two separate stories. But they both have caused a great amount of bad blood amongst Portlanders. The connecting thread? Paul Allen.

It's true that for more than a year, as I and others in the Friends of Memorial Coliseum group have fought to preserve that building, the Trail Blazers franchise ultimately became an ally in the preservation effort. The team initially gave lukewarm approval to Merritt Paulson and Mayor Adams's plan to demolish the Coliseum, but then both parties backed away and the Blazers created a plan to preserve the building. They deserve full credit for that. When the two other finalists in the Stakeholder Advisory Committee process proposed projects that would more or less destroy the interior (MARC) or the interior and exterior (VMAAC), the Blazer plan offered the one sensible redevelopment of the Coliseum as arena.

But the Trail Blazers don't have to be the only entity to preserve the Coliseum. And even if they do continue to act as manager of the arena on behalf of the City of Portland (which owns the building), does that mean we should give Paul Allen's company the chance to redevelop the rest of the Rose Quarter?

The hideous and horribly functioning present state of the Rose Quarter would be reason enough not to let Allen's company be the redeveloper or overseer of this redevelopment. When you add to it the fact that they've aligned with the Cordish Company as developer, whose experience is in suburban-style, national-chain-heavy environments, that is at least strike two. But when you add to this toxic brew an owner who is increasingly seen as an isolated, arrogant, out-of-touch, vicious, insensitive owner, it becomes a very, very difficult case to make that his anti-Midas touch should be allowed to blemish anything else here.

It pains me to write a lot of this, because I actually have a very positive opinion of the other people in the Blazers front office in Portland. In the past year of the Memorial Coliseum preservation campaign, I've had the opportunity to get to know J.E. Isaac, the Trail Blazers senior vice president of business affairs; Sarah Mensah, the team's chief marketing officer; and Bill Evans, the director of corporate communications. All three have struck me as good people who care about the local community and want to do right by our city. Unlike Allen, they live in the Portland area and have invested themselves here. But these poor folks have been wronged by Allen and Vulcan as much as the rest of us. It's too bad they work for a modern-day Howard Hughes.

Again, I know some of you reading this will see only my anger and emotion over the firing yesterday of general manager Kevin Pritchard. But there is indeed a legitimate, sober case to be made that the Pritchard incident is but the latest in a long, nearly two-decade-long string of disappointing management decisions by the organizations Paul Allen leads.

The Rose Quarter lies in the heart of central Portland. It is the largest and most important transit hub on the east side, and it has festered as a vast landscape of concrete and empty restaurants for too long. The district doesn't just need a facelift, but an utter transformation, with a vibrant riverfront scene, a mix of uses (including housing), and capable designers. It needs a planning process tied to the adjoining neighborhoods and city fabric (as Barry Johnson wrote in his excellent recent post on the Rose Quarter.) And it needs a development team who commands unequivocal faith and possesses the utmost integrity. Does that sound like a job for Paul Allen?

Nathalie Weinstein reports in Tuesday's Daily Journal of Commerce that the Request for Proposals process for the redevelopment of Memorial Coliseum has been suspended until further notice. The city will now move forward to the next phase of the Rose Quarter Development Project.

The three finalists generated by the city's Stakeholder Advisory Committee - the Blazers/Winterhawks proposal, the Memorial Athletic and Recreation Center and the Veterans Memorial Arts and Athletic Center - were encouraged by Mayor Sam Adams to prepare a joint RFP for renovating the coliseum. But in those meetings, says PDC project manager Kevin Brake in Weinstein's article, the teams and the PDC realized that budgets for two of the proposals - the MARC and VMAAC - would far exceed the $24 million in public money available for the project, and the likelihood of a voter approved general obligation bond, such as recommended by the MARC team, seems challenging in this economic climate.

Upon hearing the news, I was jubilant but inquisitive: Does this mean Memorial Coliseum has been saved, I wondered? Well, yes and no. The city is continuing with the overall Rose Quarter redevelopment process, and an RFP could still be issued down the road for the Coliseum. But based on what I've been told in talking with Brake and others, I think that's unlikely.

Memorial Coliseum, photograph by Julius Schulman, courtesy Taschen

"When we’ve looked at programmatic elements….we wanted to be sure we’re setting realistic expectations of what can reasonably fit in the Coliseum," Brake told me by phone. "More and more it seems that keeping the bowl is the most supported option both from a preservation and cost standpoint. But we see those programmatic elements could have a place in the Rose Quarter Development."

In other words, the city likes some of the programming ideas that were introduced by two finalists, the MARC and the VMAAC: amateur athletic and arts facilities. But fitting either of those programs into the Coliseum is looking to be too challenging - not to mention too much of a battle with preservationists and the Coliseum's protection under the National Register of Historic Places. Yet if MARC, the VMAAC or both proposers could help find a way to get their proposals to fit elsewhere in the Rose Quarter, be it along the riverfront where a parking lot now sits or on the site of two hideous above-ground parking garages, versions of their plans could still make it into the finished Rose Quarter.

"We’ve got [MARC proponent] Doug Obletz saying he can bring USA swimming to the table to create a regional center for swimming which could mean up to $20M in additional funding," Brake added. "Sandwiching that in the bowl seems challenging given their programmatic requirements. But we want to explore it in a collaborative way. But what are people’s thoughts? Do we want a large athletic recreation facility? And how does that relate to the rest of the city? We need to evaluate the total need for any of these programmatic elements through a thorough market analysis."

One example of how some collaboration could work: The Blazers talked about bring on Nike as a partner for an interactive museum of some sort. Wouldn't that jive really well with the amateur athletic facilities proposed in the MARC plan? Just do it outside the Coliseum and I'd support that marriage in a heartbeat.

So the Rose Quarter development process continues, as it should. This is a huge development in the center of the city that desperately needs to be re-imagined and made more of a thriving district where people live, work and play. There is plenty of room to accommodate a spectrum of programmatic functions in this massive parcel of land. It seems to me the city has figured out that it makes more sense to develop the under-utilized portions of the Rose Quarter than the one irreplaceable gem that was already there: Memorial Coliseum. What's more, the MC and the Rose Garden can function well as complimentary arenas. We just need the right mix of other programmatic functions around them, whether it's an affordable housing tower like local developer Randy Rapaport has proposed, a large hotel like the mayor and others have advocated (tied to the Convention Center), or more entertainment venues.

I would dearly love to say at this point, "It's over! Memorial Coliseum is saved! Let the party begin!" Quite honestly, I'm not yet sure if we've arrived at that point. But it's clear we are closer than ever before to being able to declare total victory in the preservation of this internationally renowned architectural diamond in the rough, a secular cathedral of modernist mastery, and the sacred ground where the Trail Blazers won a championship and the Beatles played.

In today's Oregonian, art critic D.K. Row looks at the Memorial Coliseum and Rose Quarter process currently being undertaken by the City via the Mayor's office and the Portland Development Commission.

The piece is called "Openness, with an asterisk" and the sub-headline reads, "A clause neutralizing Memorial Coliseum as a threat to the Blazers' Rose Garden makes for a flawed design process."

This article has a lot of good information and Row (who, in full disclosure, is my former editor at the paper) is a smart, perceptive critic. At the same time, there are a few points raised in the article that I want to clarify or expand upon.

First of all, the article - just like Janie Har's article in the paper a few weeks ago - incorrectly uses a rendering of the Blazers' proposed Jumptown development instead of an image of their plan for Memorial Coliseum. Jumptown is all but irrelevant right now. Jumptown hasn't been designed yet, and the rendering is just an artist's impression of some vague ideas about the overall Rose Quarter. Many people have concerns about Jumptown and justifiably so, but that rendering tells us little; it's the cart before the horse.

The issue right now is Memorial Coliseum, and the Blazers are the only one of the three finalists chosen by the Mayor's Stakeholder Advisory Committee who propose to preserve the landmark Coliseum as an arena with its seating bowl intact. Yet their plan, if people go by The Oregonian, is being judged on that meaningless rendering. I think the mistake was made not by DK Row, but is a result of the Coliseum story being parceled out to numerous reporters and sections over time, so a different Metro, Business or How We Live editor makes the same mistake each time..

Second, while DK Row's reporting is sound, I'd argue the sub-headline ("A clause neutralizing Memorial Coliseum as a threat to the Blazers' Rose Garden makes for a flawed design process"), which editors usually write instead, is misleading.

The Blazers do indeed hold the cards when it comes to the right of refusal with other projects and the RFP. But the Blazers' contract is expiring in November, and the structure of the deal could be completely rewritten. More importantly, it's not the clause that "makes for a flawed design process". It's the flawed design process that makes for the flawed design process. It's the structure of the competition, which had no provisions about budget, stocked the Advisory Committee with people protecting their demographic turf, and discouraged any kind of design expertise or inviting of talented designers.

Photo by Brian Libby

That said, there are several passages in Row's piece that are worth passing on. Row writes:

It's a narrative rife with so many tactical layers that instead of common-sense clarity, it's as cloudy as an Oregon winter. Even two city commissioners of often intensely contrasting opinions agree that this latest design episode is a murky affair that might even prompt reconsideration of how the city conducts public design processes.

"This began as a community-wide effort to save the Memorial Coliseum from the wrecking ball," says City Commissioner Nick Fish. "I celebrate that, as we now debate how much public investment we want to make into that building and area. But I fear we've structured this process to ensure an unsatisfactory outcome."

By changing his position from wanting to raze the Coliseum to rescuing it for future development, Mayor Sam Adams showed he can respond to the public - but he also doesn't have a sharp vision of his own for the building and area.

Fish and Row both make a good point: That it was great that the Coliseum was saved from demolition for a baseball stadium, a ludicrous plan. And Adams deserves credit for backing away from the baseball plan. At the same time, the ensuing process has been disastrous. Memorial Coliseum never needed some new programmatic idea. It's already a functioning arena that compliments the Rose Garden from a business perspective - actually drawing a comparable number of events to the Rose Garden in 2009 with over 150 events and over 450,000 visitors.

So for the past several months, we've encouraged people to submit ideas in a way that for all the admirable symbolism of openness and populism is totally unrealistic about the goal. And that's the problem I think has marred PDC process time and time again: process for the sake of process rather than process for the sake of product. The Coliseum process culled together a huge Advisory Committee not of creative thinkers, but of members from the community representing particular interests: a bicycle person representing bicycle interests, a neighborhood organization person representing neighborhoods, and so on. Here the appearance of inclusiveness trumped the need to figure out the dynamics of the Rose Quarter and find a way for the Coliseum and Rose Garden to work collaboratively with a variety of new functions to enliven the district. It trumped the invitation of design expertise and vision.

Looking ahead, one can already see City Council grappling to find a way out of this three-finalist process. Two of the proposals, the MARC (Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex) and the VMAAC (Veterans Memorial Arts & Athletic Center), would be exponentially more expensive than what the City has funds for, at a time when floating a public bond measure is extremely untenable.

"We've launched a process at the front end without an agreement of what we, the city, are willing to spend," Fish told Row. "We've deferred on the money issues."

Photo by Brian Libby

As it happens, the design side is no better than the money side.

Worse, two of the finalists gut the building: the MARC on the inside (by gutting the interior) and the VMAAC outside (by adding a scaffolding-like exoskeleton and tacking on more program). This is a building on the National Register of Historic Places that is matchless in the world: the only major arena on Planet Earth that boasts a 360-degree glass view out every direction. We should be talking about anywhere else to put these functions in the Rose Quarter except for the Coliseum. So we're looking at a process where two of three options not only are vastly more expensive than the City can afford, but also spit in the face of the building's National Register listing, which protects the seating bowl inside as well as the glass exterior outside.

The Blazers are not blameless either. Their insistence on working with an out-of-town developer known for suburban, antiseptic, corporate-feeling entertainment zones has made the local public skeptical on the design front. What's more, by releasing an image of Jumptown without doing any design work first, the team has put its worst foot forward. We should be talking about the Blazers' Coliseum design plans, yet all one ever hears about is Jumptown, Cordish and a Kafka-esque operating agreement. And while the Blazer plan for Memorial Coliseum is vastly more preservation oriented than either of the other two options, it does call for the removal of the Coliseum's iconic entry canopy. And that's saying nothing of the potentially crass, neo-historic design work that seems to be the operating principal of the Jumptown district. I think the Blazer plan would look so much more attractive if they'd hold off on talking about Jumptown, commit to Rick Potestio as their lead architect (he's currently a paid consultant) and rethink what the Rose Quarter needs to be for the city: not just an entertainment feeder to the arenas, but a vibrant mixed use neighborhood.

Luckily the City Council is taking a hard look at the 'Base Case', which is, depending on whom you talk to, a kind of fourth option along with the other three, or a Plan B alternative to the three finalists. Base Case is the idea of restoring Memorial Coliseum as an arena, but even that is subject to debate.

The City is looking to create a Base Case restoration option that does the minimum amount of deferred maintenance; it's being dubbed the "status quo" option. The group that I'm part of, the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, would like to see a Base Case that goes further and tries to enliven the building with new design concepts, such as enhancements to make the Veterans Memorial wall more accessible, remodel the massive exhibit hall underground, and reconfigure the Coliseum's concourse stairways to create more of a winter garden-like public space.

Think of it this way: Imagine Portland owns a classic 1960 Corvette. We could either (A) tear apart the whole thing, (B) only tear out the engine and interior but leave the body, (C) leave the car but try to buff out some of the scratches and dents with a rag, or (D) restore the car. Oh, and we only have a few dollars for the whole thing.

I'd obviously pick "D", but maybe that's just me. Then again, though, it's not just me. It's the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US Green Building Council, and the American Institute of Architects, all of which have called for Memorial Coliseum's preservation as an arena. And it's the silent majority of Portlanders who don't want to vote for a bond measure to gut the building when schools and parks and social services are woefully underfunded. It's the veterans who fought in World War II and to whom the entire building is dedicated, such as my grandfathers. It's the kids at Jefferson High who want their school to be a school again, or the homeless street people who'd rather have a homeless day center than be harassed for sleeping on the sidewalk. It's Blazer fans who saw the team win its only championship there. And it's the world architecture community, who doesn't want to see Portland throw away its Glass Palace.

The more I observe the Memorial Coliseum process, the more I go back to the original flaw that began this whole thing. There was a proposal by the Beavers/Timbers owner to raze the Coliseum and build a baseball stadium on the site, which was defeated. But then that issue set in motion a public process to generate ideas for the building and, from the City's perspective, find a private entity willing to buy their way into a public-private partnership. Whether you blame the Mayor or PDC, the City wound up rushing into a process to generate ideas for the building. I keep hearing from people at the City, "There were so many ideas for the building and the public wanted change." But I disagree with that premise. There were a lot of people against the baseball stadium replacing and destroying the Coliseum. Sam Adams did a great job of recognizing that. But instead of staging a giant parade of process to solicit ideas from everyone and their mother, we should have just stopped, recognized that the Coliseum has financial and cultural value as it is, and start working toward making overdue maintenance upgrades to the building. But instead, we've opened the floodgates to a spectrum of interest groups with their own programmatic agendas for the building and the allure of getting their hands on public dollars to make it happen. A private developer resurrected his old plan for a recreation center. Arts and community groups threw together proposals that would entitle them to all that space. But that wasn't the right question to ask in the first place. We didn't need a new program. And so now we're choosing from three plans that answer a question we shouldn't have asked.

Luckily this is dawning on City Council because these official yet erroneous finalists all have programs that would be prohibitively expensive. It's ironic to me that budget is what could kill the VMAAC or the MARC, and not the fact that that they're wrong for the Coliseum. But if that's what saves the building, from demolition and from the ass-backwards, wide-eyed process that's gotten us here, that's fine by me.

On Wednesday of this week (April 14), City Council took up the issue of Memorial Coliseum's redevelopment and the three finalists forwarded by the Mayor Adams-chaired Stakeholder Advisory Committee.

The Council wound up approving unanimously the three finalists forwarded by the SAC: the Trail Blazers' restoration of Memorial Coliseum as well as plans by the Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex (MARC) and Veterans Memorial Arts & Athletic Center (VMAAC) to demolish the National Register-listed landmark's interior.

The grassroots group that I belong to, Friends of Memorial Coliseum, worked to bring several citizens to testify about the importance of saving the building inside and out. But because Council's "time certain" hearing at 2:30pm was delayed by some three hours, many of the people we had lined up to testify had to leave before their chance at the microphone finally came.

Mike McCulloch, former head of the city's Design Commission, was one such testifier unable to pitch a tent in Council chambers who eventually had to leave. Another was Jeff Belluschi, grandson of Pietro Belluschi, the most renowned architect Portland has ever produced and designer of landmarks like the Portland Art Museum and the Equitable Building (the world's first modern office building) as well as the Pan-Am Building and Juilliard School in New York.

My grandfather apprenticed with the architect AE Doyle beginning in 1925. Doyle began his own apprenticeship in Portland in 1892. When he passed away in January 1928, The Oregonian labeled him the “designer of Portland’s skyline.” Doyle dreamed of a city wherein there would be no ugliness, no harshness of line, no incongruity of details.

Pietro bought out the other Doyle office partners in 1943 and the firm became Pietro Belluschi Architects. The success of Northwest regionalism and modernist works by Pietro brought national acclaim. In 1951, Pietro became Dean of Architecture at MIT and the firm became Belluschi & Skidmore Owings and Merrill or B/SOM until 1956 when SOM and Pietro parted. SOM was drawn to the Northwest after opening a San Francisco office, its first on the West Coast. At the time Belluschi Architects was the largest firm in the NW and SOM saw an opportunity in Portland to align with a prominent office not found in Seattle. SOM was the largest and most respected architectural firm in America. SOM Portland designed Memorial Coliseum.

I give this history lesson so that all here today are reminded of historical context and continuum. It all began with a vision by AE Doyle in 1906: “all new things built with the idea of preserving the beauty of the city and adding to it”.

The modern movement was very much a product of its times. There was a fascination with the promise of technology. Integral to the design ethos was the element of light and simplicity of design void of excess ornamentation so prevalent in the early 20th century. By the late fifties our country’s optimism and look to a fabulous future were unbridled. Memorial Coliseum is a stunning example of this mindset. Rockets, man on the moon, television: the world was in a flux of change for the good. Look to Seattle and the stunning remnant of the 1962 World’s Fair-the Seattle Center.

In 1982 Douglas Gantenbein wrote in NW Magazine, “Portland is perceived as a city that with few exceptions survived the vicissitudes of the 20th century urban growth through an enlightened political process, a conscientious design community and a general commitment to retain the qualities passed on by settlers who built for the long haul”. Memorial Coliseum was both designed and built for the “long haul”. Fifty years young Memorial Coliseum needs some care and respect as an architectural jewel.

Yesterday, I spoke with the architect Saul Zaik, who worked at SOM at the time Memorial Coliseum was designed. Shortly after its completion Portland hosted a national AIA convention at Memorial Coliseum. Architects from all over the country were amazed at it’s beauty and uniqueness. Saul laments that the jewel has been neglected and we are here today contemplating changes that would destroy the harmony of the classical bowl and glass box that is Memorial Coliseum.

Almost thirty years ago Saul and my grandfather sat in these chambers attempting to dissuade the city council from selecting Michael Graves’ design for the Portland Building. The renowned architect Moshe Safdie referred to the Portland Building in The Atlantic Monthly “a private joke in a public space”. Memorial Coliseum deserves careful thought and consideration going forward today.

In 1951 Pietro spoke at Reed College and imparted the following words of wisdom: It is important to “retain a respect for the symbols and forms of the past because people need them and live by them to a greater extent than is realized. They furnish a feeling of continuity which give them faith in their evolution.”

It is in this historical context of continuity that we must savor and allow Memorial Coliseum to remain intact as originally designed for future generations.

Thank you for listening Mayor Adams and City Council members.

The bottom line from Jeff, as his statement describes, is that there is a direct lineage between Pietro Belluschi, A.E. Doyle, and Memorial Coliseum. The greatest architects in Portland's history lead directly to that building. What's more, as Jeff also notes, Skidmore Owings & Merrill is perhaps America's most accomplished architecture firm of the 20th Century.

After more than a year of wrangling about the future of Memorial Coliseum, first under the threat of demolition for a minor league baseball stadium, and then with a mayor-appointed committee considering re-use proposals, City Council is set to take up the fate of the building this Wednesday.

Earlier this year, three finalists were selected for the redevelopment: The Memorial Athletic and Recreation Center (MARC) from developer Douglas Obletz, the Veterans' Memorial Arts and Athletic Center (VMAAC) from a consortium of veterans and other stakeholders, and the Trail Blazers' Jumptown proposal.

At issue now is the Request For Proposals being issued by the city. One of the finalists' backers, Obletz, lobbied City Council to renegotiate the agreement before offering development rights it may not have to others. In his letter to Council, Obletz expressed concern that a component of his proposal, a 6,500-seat arena, would not be allowed under the operating agreement because the city's operating agreement with Portland Arena Management allows the city to operate the Coliseum only as a non-spectator facility.

"The Blazers have been very forthcoming with our team and have repeatedly indicated that there are no circumstances under which they would be willing to relinquish their operating rights to the Coliseum," Obletz said in the letter. "Given the Operating Agreement language, and the Blazer's stated position on these rights, we must question the legal ability of the city to offer the use of the Coliseum for our proposal."

Obletz requested that city council delay proceeding with the RFP process until the operating agreement can be re-negotiated between the city and PAM. But Mayor Sam Adams announced on March 22 that such a renegotiation wouldn't happen because it’s not necessary because all finalists, even the Trail Blazers, would need to renegotiate the operating agreement for whatever use they have planned. The Blazers currently hold operating options on the facility until 2023.

“The best time to renegotiate the details of the Operating Agreement is once we choose a proposal for the Memorial Coliseum and embark on negotiating a redevelopment agreement,” he said in the letter.

Are you confused yet? Even after following this for more than a year, I am. But it seems to me that the RFP issue Obletz speaks about is fairly moot if the agreement is rewritten down the road.

Meanwhile, I wanted to address a very discouraging effort by an otherwise laudably progressive organization, Onward Oregon, which describes itself as "part of growing grassroots movement to restore civic power to the people of Oregon and their communities. We envision a state where all of us can enjoy comfort and prosperity, equal opportunity and a beautiful and healthy environment."

Recently Onward Oregon began asking its members to lobby City Council for a selection of either the MARC or VMAAC proposals - in other words, specifically to vote against the Trail Blazers' Jumptown proposal.

"As you may know," its website says, "the leading contender is the Trail Blazers’ plan to create an entertainment district called Jumptown. Many feel that such a district, including their proposal for the Memorial Coliseum, would serve a narrow demographic and will privatize a space that was once shared and owned in common. We are concerned that Jumptown & the Trail Blazers’ plan for the Memorial Coliseum will make Memorial Coliseum a commercial and community deadzone."

No doubt there are reasons to be critical of the entertainment zone the Blazers have proposed, as well as the out-of-town developer they've chosen to work with, Cordish, which seems to favor chain stores and a generally antiseptic, suburban milieu.

BUT - and this is the crucial thing - the Jumptown proposal is the only one that would save Memorial Coliseum.

Both the MARC and the VMAAC would only leave the Coliseum exterior, and would otherwise completely gut the building's interior. Is that moving us "Onward" to blow up history and architectural mastery?

If you gut the interior of Memorial Coliseum, you might as well tear the whole building down. The entire reason this building is an architectural landmark of international renown, and unique in the world for large-scale arenas, is because of the relationship between the arena seating bowl and the surrounding glass perimeter: the bowl in the box. The curving organic form of the concrete seating bowl, free of any columns other other impediments, sitting inside the rigid linear geometry of the glass box.

I'm not saying Jumptown is perfect by any means. In fact, it's very much imperfect. But the entertainment-zone plans, the potentially crass neo-historic architecture Cordish favors: all of those can still be changed for the better. The Blazers are open to countless other ideas: housing, community facilities - many of the very things the MARC and VMAAC propose. Yet if either of the other two finalists is chosen, Memorial Coliseum will be ruined.

Onward Oregon ought to know better. They've been on the correct side of many past political debates. But this time the group has come down on the side of local proposers at the expense of Portland's history and one of its irreplaceable landmarks. I'm sure these are good people at Onward Oregon, trying to do the right thing. But shame on them and their potentially catastrophic ignorance.

Look, I don't mean to sound like an angry know-it-all lecturing people about architecture and Memorial Coliseum. And I certainly don't feel comfortable siding with a corporate developer over local interests. But the truth is that MARC and the VMAAC pose a much greater danger for Portland than Cordish does. And anyone who has been inside that building with the curtain open, looking out at a panoramic view of downtown Portland through the glass, will likely feel the same way. This is an absolute treasure, and if Jumptown isn't selected as the future of the Rose Quarter, the masterpiece known as Memorial Coliseum will be destroyed.

Oh, and as it happens, MARC and VMAAC would be much more expensive than keeping the building as an arena. Does Portland really want to take money from funding schools or affordable housing, for example, to dump scores or hundreds of millions into gutting the Coliseum? Why spend so much on something frivolous and destroy history in the process?

Instead of building the MARC or VMAAC inside the Coliseum and ruining the building in the process, I think we're missing the obvious.

A few days ago I went to Memorial Coliseum to photograph the building from a western vantage point, trying to get a shot of the building before all the deciduous trees in front of the building begin to sprout foliage, thus blocking off the Glass Palace from proper view. Standing along Interstate Avenue, across from the Coliseum, I happened to look at the riverfront property beside the Broadway Bridge. You know what's there? A big freaking parking lot. It's where Rose Quarter employees keep their cars.

Photo by Brian Libby

This waterfront space is some of the most potentially valuable real estate in the city, and it's currently a riverside parking lot. Isn't THIS where we should be adding functions like an athletic center or arts facilities? Why not use the empty space you have, especially if it's prime riverfront space, before destroying architectural landmarks?

Photo by Brian Libby

Obviously the city process thus far has been focused on proposals for Memorial Coliseum. But if the whole process were handled a bit differently, we might be able to look at the development in a more holistic manner - one that could be beneficial for everyone without cutting off Portland's nose to spite its face.

Look at the Rose Quarter riverfront parking lot shown above and picture a smaller glass palace, a foothill to the Coliseum's mountain, where people are exercising and/or making art with a view of the Willamette. Wouldn't it be great?

Francis tells of meeting recently with David J. Brown and Anthea Hartig, the executive vice president and the western director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, when the pair were in Portland last week. (Individuals and groups continually seek out the paper's editorial board to make their case for something.)

Brown's primary message was, as Francis recalls, "that saving and reusing buildings is more environmentally friendly and economically sound than tearing them down, even if they are replaced by the greenest, LEEDiest structures imaginable."

The report concludes that the Federal Historic Tax Credit is a highly efficient job creator, and has accounted for the creation of 1.8 million new jobs over the life of the program. The report also finds that the Federal Historic Tax Credit has generated jobs more efficiently than other stimulus options, and that the economic activity leveraged by credit returns more tax revenue to the U.S. Treasury than the cost of implementing the program.

"The case for preservation improving sustainability is more intuitive," Francis writes. He goes on to say:

"Of course it's less wasteful to reuse a building than to tear it apart, cart away the rubble, and import and erect new piles of steel, glass and concrete. That was what so maddening (to me, at least) with the arguments of those who wanted to tear down Memorial Coliseum to erect a "green" baseball stadium. As much as I appreciate the presence of baseball, beer and warm summer evenings, it seemed crazy to demolish a perfectly usable building a couple of miles away from the Beavers' current home to relocate the team. The only argument in favor seemed to be that nobody had yet figured out how to put the coliseum to use since the Trail Blazers moved next door, so better to tear the place down than re-use it.

That kind of thinking is what threatens a lot of the places where we work, live and play. Sometimes, we manage to make the best of it, as when civic leaders created Pioneer Courthouse Square on the block that housed a grand Portland hotel until it was demolished for parking. Sometimes, we do a halfway decent thing, such as pouring money into the Pioneer Courthouse next door, although it was an enormously bad idea to, essentially, privatize the place by evicting the post office and carving out an exclusive underground parking lot for the visiting judges there.

Most often, sadly, we tear down something of cultural, emotional or historical value in order to make way for something else, usually of lesser value. When that happens, we're all the poorer for it."

Of course one of the key landmarks under threat of demolition or radical alteration Francis talks about, Memorial Coliseum, still has its fate hanging in the balance.

Photo by Brian Libby

It is arguable that all three of the remaining finalists selected by the mayor and PDC's Stakeholder Advisory Committee are at least partially preservation oriented in that they preserve the exterior. But only the Blazers' Jumptown proposal actually retains the inside of the building as an arena without compromising the integrity of its signature bowl-in-a-glass-box design. Oh, and in this Great Recession, retaining the Coliseum as an arena is the cheapest option and the most sustainable. And have you been in this building with the curtain open, like it was meant to be? I've met few Portlanders, even the natives, who actually have.

As it happens, National Public Radio ran a story on Morning Edition a few days ago ("Building Law Seen As Threat To California History") about the intersection of sustainability and preservation. The story profiled Paul Song, who, after demolishing his home, is now building a $1 million LEED-Platinum house which will be the first “100% energy-independent” home in Santa Monica. The piece went on to quote Linda Dishman, Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, saying that the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standards don’t do a particularly good job of recognizing the value of building reuse.

However, the NPR story also, in the opinion of Portland's Ralph DiNola of Green Building Services (as written on his blog), "painted a picture that new green buildings can outperform historic buildings and that rehabilitation of existing buildings takes more time or costs more than demolition and new construction, while also leaving the impression that LEED does not adequately credit historic rehabilitation projects compared to new construction projects."

"Perhaps rather than focusing on our desire to have LEED award more points to historic building rehabilitation projects (hopefully they will based upon more advanced LCA methods in the near future), let’s look at the other LEED points that a project can already earn through rehabilitation. Under LEED for New Construction and Major Renovation (LEED NC), a rehabilitation project can actually earn four points for building reuse. In LEED for Core & Shell (LEED CS), there are five points available plus an additional one point if 95% of the building is reused for a total of six points. Elsewhere in the rating system there are other nods to existing building rehabilitation projects, such as Energy and Atmosphere Credit 1. Here, existing buildings get more points for the same level of energy performance compared to new buildings. For instance in LEED NC, if a rehabilitation projects reduces design energy cost by 24% it will earn nine points, while a new construction project will only earn seven points. That’s two more points for historic buildings. There are also two points available for materials reuse, and we have found that existing buildings more often incorporate salvaged materials than new construction projects. There are also additional opportunities for credit in LEED in the Innovation and Regional Priority credit categories. In Portland, Oregon for instance, the Building Reuse credit is identified as a Regional Priority credit, thus offering one bonus point to projects that earn this credit. This intentional allocation of points suggests that LEED strategically favors, rather than challenges, reuse, as is sometimes implied."

"Portland has served as a virtual laboratory for sustainable preservation, yet we still struggle with these issues," he concludes. "These are indeed exciting times for historic preservation advocates and green building professionals as American values shift from valuing our history to valuing the new."

Last night at Memorial Coliseum was a wonderful kind of civic spectacle. Inside the arena, where the ice was set up for a Winter Hawks hockey game, presenters from all walks of life gave their pitches on what should be done with this landmark building. There were educators talking about creating a cultural museum, entrepreneurs suggesting wave pools and video conferencing centers, architects, developers, veterans' groups, peace activists, social service providers championing a cultural center, and representatives of the Trail Blazers there with their preservation plan.

Outside the arena in the Coliseum's concourse, with views out onto the nighttime skyline, hundreds of people perused a long line of tables showing off the proposals, while a jazz ensemble played tunes nearby. At this stage of the Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee process, it's kind of like the first round in the NCAA basketball tournament or a grand-slam tennis match, with overwhelming favorites cast in the same pool as huge longshots. Ultimately the committee will only go forward with properly funded and widely supported plans, but for this night it was fun to see such a wide cross-section of individuals addressing the committee on a level playing field.

The Trail Blazers provided some of the additional images of Memorial Coliseum and their plan for it, which was a weakness in the Jumptown presentation when it was originally released. As these renderings show, the Blazers and the Winter Hawks (who are a partner in the proposal) have mostly left the original architecture alone, except for carving a new opening into the seating bowl at the building's entrance and removing the original entry canopy. I don't think the opening is a bad idea, although as I've said before, I hope the Blazers' plan is changed to retain the canopy.

The perceived top contender after the Blazers, local developer Douglas Obletz of Shiels Obletz Johnsen, had already released a wider variety of images of his proposed MARC, or Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex. Obletz spoke passionately about current Coliseum and Rose Quarter planning as this generation's "Pioneer Courthouse Square moment," a participatory civic act that gives birth to a new, much loved public gathering place. During his presentation, Obletz showed a video accompanied by John Lennon's "Imagine", with graphics and animated text evoking notions of a MARC (seen in a rendering below) overflowing with families and amateur athletes, local college and high school teams.

I found use of the Lennon song and the presentation's populist rhetoric to be a little over the top. It seems to me as if Obletz is trying to cast a potential contest between the MARC and the Blazers as a David and Goliath story, with the MARC representing the people's choice and Jumptown representing only corporate, out-of-town interests. ("Ahoy, there be Baltimoreans at our gates, ye olde Portlanders! Batten down the hatches!") Yet Obletz's firm has been very successful and prominent in Portland for many years. He's not the biggest fish in this pond, but he and the MARC team dwarf most of the other 96 proposals in resources and connections.

But don't get me wrong: This is not an endorsement of the Jumptown plan. It's too soon to say, and too early in the process.

Ultimately, of course, it's not really about who has a bigger or smaller development team, or whether they come from Portland, so much as a decision about Memorial Coliseum. And while the Blazers' Jumptown plan as we've seen it presented so far unquestionably has flaws, Iast night's proposals were about Memorial Coliseum, and I found their renovation plan to be the most sensible, plausible, and preservation-oriented.

For those who also attended the event last night and watched the presentations, what were your impressions? What were your favorites?

As the Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee gathers this evening (January 26 from 5-8:30pm) at Memorial Coliseum, I'd like to continue looking at some of the proposals. In the last four posts the focus was one project at a time, but with 95 proposals in all and presentations coming today, I'll present several this time.

First there is the "Light It Up" (pictured in renderings at top and immediately below), a concept described as bringing natural light into two zones within the existing Coliseum building. "The convention space located beneath the Main Entry Plaza has been identified and described by many as being dark and uninviting," its summary reads. So they propose an addition of two sculptural skylights: one centered before the building's main entry canopy and the second in the plaza. "In two other areas, natural light can be avoidably brought into the Convention Space by creating large punched opening along the space's western walls on either side of the main entry and inserting a glazing system. This will bring in light and afford conventioneer's views of the fountain and courtyards while also letting the public view inside to see what is happening."

The Light It Up concept also poses a replacement of the Coliseum's main roof to let in expansive daylight. The proposal explains that "the roof decking would be removed and replaced with either a translucent panel system or glazing system."

Personally, I really like half of this concept, where skylights are cut into the Coliseum's underground exhibit hall. This is something the Friends of Memorial Coliseum has suggested from the beginning of this process: enlivening the exhibit hall with natural light and using this area as the focus of new development and programming.

As for cutting a gigantic skylight into Memorial Coliseum proper, the arena itself, I'm more skeptical. Much of the building's structural support comes from the roof, so I'm not sure it is possible to do. But even if it is, there is already substantial natural light brought in from the four glass walls. The skylight above could amount to expensive overkill.

Another concept, which I admittedly find a little silly, is the Car Memorial Museum. "We propose to re-purpose Memorial Coliseum in a way that will foster Portland’s evolution into a model sustainable city of the future," the proposal says. "Our concept begins with the counterintuitive conversion of the Coliseum into a colossal robotic parking garage. And it ends mid-century with the launching of a museum that celebrates the bygone era of the automobile."

"The Coliseum building is well-suited to hold a modular robotic parking system," the proposal continues, "and could accommodate roughly 5200 cars. Ideally, it would be one of several such 'Mobility Centers' that would ring downtown. Over time, as the city grows and reliance on cars declines, these facilities would be relocated to less urbanized areas. Eventually, when parking is no longer needed in the Coliseum, we propose convert it back to a civic use, namely the 'Car Memorial Museum.' The robotic parking apparatus would then be re-purposed to store museum 'specimens,' and to retrieve them on demand for close up display to museum patrons.

The people behind the Car Memorial Museum aren't just parking magnates. They explain on the proposal's website that while parking is a lucrative endeavor, their real purpose is to celebrate the end of the automobile.

Even so, I can't help but feel a robotic parking garage is an slap in the face to Gordon Bunshaft (the legendary Skidmore Owings Merrill architect behind the design) and Bill Walton, and to the Coliseum's place as a landmark building. It would gut the interior of the Coliseum and devote it to automobiles in a city where bicyclists and pedestrians are king.

Then there is the Peace Garden (below), from local architect Bill Badrick. "My proposal is to turn a former sports building into a garden/hotel/indoor gourmet center," Badrick writes. The entire seating bowl will be converted to personal garden boxes. Each former seat will become a private high tech planter for lease to city gardeners for their prize lilly or rose bush.

"The building," Badrick adds, "will have a sun-filled inflatable insulated dome added. The centerpiece of this garden bowl is a ferris wheel which rotates to allow dramatic garden viewing. The concourse around the seating/planting bowl will be made into a boutique green hotel. The building will create all of it's [sic] energy needs with a Water Wheel in the adjacent Willamette River."

Badrick has been a regular Portland Architecture reader and commenter for a long time, and I've always appreciated his insights as well as the watercolor paintings he creates for all of his design ideas. In the past he has also submitted ideas for the Willamette MAX bridge being built by TriMet, as well as the Columbia River Crossing bridge, each focused around the idea of adding park-like spaces to the bridges.

So I want to give Bill the utmost respect when I say this: A ferris wheel? An inflated dome? The seating bowl converted to garden boxes? Are you kidding?

Like I said, with 95 submissions there isn't enough time in my day (or month) to write about all of the proposals. If there's a great Coliseum/Rose Quarter proposal among the 95 that someone things I really should look at and present in more detail, I'm happy to oblige. But you can also read about each of the proposals here, on the Rose Quarter Development Project website. And again, at 5PM tonight at Memorial Coliseum, presenters will be making presentations in their own words.

Continuing our look at some of the 95 proposals for Memorial Coliseum that were submitted to the mayor and PDC's Stakeholder Advisory Committee, and mindful of tomorrow (January 26) as the date when presentations on these projects will be made at the Coliseum, is the Portland Action Sports Complex and Resort.

The idea here stems from how The Rose Quarter, including both The Rose Garden and Memorial Coliseum arenas, has long represented professional sports in Portland. The program seeks to address how participation in American sport is changing. Participation in many traditional sports (hockey, baseball) is declining, even as participation in other outdoor sports of the "X Games" variety like skateboarding or cyclocross or snowboarding, has grown substantially.

"The redevelopment of Portland’s Rose Quarter offers an opportunity to create a world class facility that can combine the history of the old with the potential and excitement of the new," the PASCR website says, "while providing a safe place for families and friends to participate in a wide variety of active sports."

The complex, they say, "would include some of the best facilities in the world for sports such as surfing, skateboarding, BMX biking, rock climbing, kayaking, and white water rafting in one location. The facility would also include family friendly activities, including water slides, tubing, instruction and camps."

The proposal also includes copious mention of sustainable design and construction methods intended. Most unique in this regard would be a "living machine", with wastewater processed through a series of water storage tanks that would biologically treat the water before it re-enters the environment.

Also included in this Rose Quarter plan would be a 250-500 room resort hotel with accompanying retail shops. "The entire development would be a destination resort that could become the athletic center of the city," the proposal goes on, "Each facility would be designed to encourage daily use but, in combination with exterior plazas and outdoor spaces would be able to accommodate large scale professional events, such as the Dew Action Sports Tour and the X-Games.

In terms of the Rose Quarter's physical makeup, the PASCR proposal would more or less leave Memorial Coliseum untouched except for necessary restoration and new seating for the arena. Like the Blazers, the he Portland Action Sports Complex and Resort sees the Coliseum having continuing value as a medium-sized arena with not only sporting events but a continuing role as a multipurpose arena.

As I got into the meat of this proposal on the website, it became clearer that water recreation and sport lies at the heart.

The PASCR would include what they are calling the "world’s first indoor circular wave pool", designed by the Kelly Slater Wave Company. "This design utilizes a large circular pool that creates perpetual waves and is located below street level at the heart of the new hotel," the website goes on. "The wave pool is sunken approximately 40-feet below street level with a high atrium space overhead that will allow natural south-facing sunlight to wash over the space creating a stunning view from street level and from the reception and lobby areas of the hotel. A number of rooms and conference facilities could easily be located to overlook the wave pool from the cantilevered terraces above the space. A hotel would be integrated with the wave pool and other water features, like a kayaking path, lap pools and so on.

Another aspect of the proposal is the Memorial Plaza, the large open space between Memorial Coliseum, the Rose Garden, the new hotel and wave pool. The large, flat plaza is bordered on the east side along NE Wheeler Avenue with a set of steps that gently integrate the site's nearly eighteen feet of grade change from Wheeler Avenue to the front doors of the Coliseum.

Overall, I like the idea of a hotel on the Rose Quarter site because it could put more people on the ground there than just people coming to events at the arenas. The idea of having a sort of themed destination sports-and-spa resort seems not so outlandish.

And of course having been involved in trying to save Memorial Coliseum and follow the strictures of its National Register listing, I like the fact that PASCR would let the MC be the MC.

As far as programming, I also like the idea of adding athletics and fitness-oriented programming to the Rose Quarter, just as the Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex (MARC) proposal does. Only the PASCR, unlike the MARC, would do so in a way that keeps the Coliseum's original architecture intact. Wonderful as the MARC's programming is, it guts the inside of the building.

At the same time, the wave pool feels just a little gimmicky to me. I don't mean that wave pools themselves are without value. It sounds like a lot of fun to go surfing in the middle of the city, especially when it's raining outside for months straight. And hey, it's a great tie in with "the wave", that silly stunt that sports fans do at games when their team has a big lead. But if building the wave pool is ultimately the hook on which everything hangs, the whole raison d'etre for this proposal, well somehow that feels a little backwards.

He's neither a developer nor an architect or businessman. James Harrison is an artist whose large scale public sculptures have received sizable acclaim. He was instrumental in saving the Lovejoy Columns several years ago, and his sculptures have been commissioned for locations ranging from Portland's Eastbank Esplanade to an exclusive club in London called Hospital.

Harrison is one of the 95 parties who have submitted ideas for Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter. Likely his proposal won't be treated as seriously as those from the Trail Blazers or developer Douglas Obletz (who have offered Jumptown and the Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex), simply because he doesn't have the same resources to generate the concept or see it through with funding. Even so, Harrison's "Jumptown Plaza" proposal is more than worth a look.

The Jumptown Plaza scheme is relatively simple, which may be its greatest strength. It looks to preserve Memorial Coliseum as a functioning multipurpose arena. Basically Harrison imagines restoring the arena according to its National Register strictures. The lone exception is a new entry canopy, placed on the south side of the building to better orient it to the Rose Garden and to the riverfront.

If there is a bold, more substantial part of Harrison's plan, it is to replace the Trail Blazers' One Center Court building with a new high-rise tower. I like this idea a lot, because One Center Court is one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen. It's basically a giant parking garage with a few floors of office above it and a hideous curving roof. What's more, One Center Court takes up a lot of land that could, as Harrison points out in his scheme, become part of a more substantial plaza or public courtyard.

In Harrison's proposed plaza, there would be room for a series of vendors selling food to eat as well as produce. A public market or farmers market could be held here on a regular basis, or there could be a setup for food-cart vendors. (Just a modest series of uniform stalls could eliminate their ugly trailers but maintain the wonderfully Portland spirit of the food cart explosion.) In addition, Harrison envisions a sculptural piece that doubles as a protective cover from the rain.

"To accommodate the Portland ethos," Harrison told me, "it needs to be fine grained and not mega scaled. The Rose Quarter already has the mega scale with the two arenas. It needs that fine grain." By fine grain, he means smaller-scale vendors who operate using a hundred square feet, not ten thousand.

Harrison's scheme also creates a bridge over Interstate Avenue to connect the Rose Quarter with adjacent riverfront property. This is another crucial aspect of any Rose Quarter plan. The property sits next to such a valuable resource in the river. We could have another, only better, Eastbank Esplanade here. It would be a great place to put some of the restaurants or bars the Blazers are envisioning with Jumptown.

Harrison admits that his renderings aren't as sophisticated or extensive as the MARC's, and that his plans for the entire Rose Quarter aren't as ambitious as the Blazers'. Even so, the basic idea of his Jumptown Plaza concept is very sound: Recognize the Coliseum is already a well functioning and beloved resource; enhance the public plaza between the Coliseum and the Rose Quarter; change out the One Center Court building, which is truly the problem here; and create a connection to the river. Problem solved, right?

As the mayor’s Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee begins vetting proposals later this month for the renovation of Memorial Coliseum, here at Portland Architecture I’ve tried to describe the pair of leading contenders, the Trail Blazers’ Jumptown and Douglas Obletz’s Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex (MARC), more or less objectively. I also plan to write about some of the other proposals that have been offered, and will do that in the days ahead.

But in the meantime, I want to make something clear: The Trail Blazers appear to have the plan that is vastly more preserving of the original bowl-in-the-glass-box design that makes Memorial Coliseum special and great. That said, appear is an operative word. They still have to prove it with more drawings and follow-throughs on pledges.

It was easy to be distracted from the Blazers’ plans for the Coliseum when the Jumptown scheme was released earlier this month. At this stage of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee process, only Coliseum renovation plans have been asked for, but the Blazers went ahead and submitted their ideas for the entire Rose Quarter district. Their plans show not just a renovated Coliseum, but also a vast array of hotels, residential construction, an entertainment complex and more. It spreads not only through the RQ but also across Broadway to and across Interstate Avenue to the riverfront.

Usually taking a holistic view from the get-go is a good thing, and the Blazers are correct to see that the Rose Quarter is not an island (even if it seems so now) but instead connected to the city fabric in crucial ways. They see it’s the Rose Quarter that’s the problem, not Memorial Coliseum.

The building, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill and opened in 1960, represents a culmination of integrity, excellence and wonder. The size of four city blocks but resting on just four columns, it is perhaps the only arena of this size in the world that has a completely transparent exterior facade. It's a glass jewel box.

Photo courtesy City of Portland archives

The Trail Blazers are proposing a light-handed renovation for Memorial Coliseum that preserves nearly everything crucial and wonderful about the architecture.The seating bowl inside would remain intact. Likely only the seats themselves would be switched out, allowing not only more leg room for attendees but also for the team to create the approximately 7,000-seat arena they seek without any structural change to the bowl.

Although the MARC plan has evolved positively to now include a similarly sized 7,000-seat venue to what the Blazers propose (originally Obletz’s scheme had no arena), and even though renderings now show the building’s exterior glass façade being preserved (instead of a TVA Architects-designed façade that resembled their own portfolio more than the original structure), one thing is still clear: The MARC proposal completely guts the inside of Memorial Coliseum, so much so that it would no longer be the same building. The Blazers’ proposal is the truest preservation we have.

What’s more, a lot of what Obletz is proposing for the MARC is also proposed in the Jumptown scheme, only in a less invasive way. The Blazers too are offering a bevy of athletic facilities available to the community. But the Jumptown plan puts those facilities in the massive underground portion of Memorial Coliseum, a space so large that Portland used to hold its annual show there. Both schemes even include a sports museum, but only the Blazers’ proposal would preserve the interior of the Coliseum itself.

The Obletz scheme is more ambitious in its provision of athletic facilities; there are more swimming pools and basketball courts. Yet it completely sacrifices the interior of the building to produce what seems to be only an extra 50,000 to 75,000 square feet of additional athletic space.

Then there’s cost: While the Blazers may have ambitious plans for the rest of the Rose Quarter (and beyond) with Jumptown, the team’s Memorial Coliseum scheme would be vastly, vastly cheaper than the MARC proposal. We’re talking about a minor facelift versus radical reconstructive surgery. Considering we’re still stumbling through The Great Recession, does Portland really want to choose the more expensive scheme?

At this point you might say, “OK, I accept that the Blazers have the more preservation-oriented about the Coliseum, but I’m really concerned about Jumptown.” After all, the Jumptown renderings show a cheesy array of faux-historic brick buildings with a crassly ginormous canopy. What’s more, the Blazers’ development partner, The Cordish Company, has a controversial reputation, and the entertainment districts Cordish has built in places like Kansas City, Louisville and Los Angeles don’t seem like the right fit here.

But you have to understand something about Jumptown: Other than the Coliseum renovation plan, the scheme unveiled is still in its early stages. Even if we greenlight Jumptown, there is still time to convince the Blazers to employ a top local architect and to favor contemporary architecture over faux historicism with the buildings comprising the entertainment portions of the Rose Quarter.

What we’ve seen so far are just early renderings provided by Cordish and its frequent architectural partner, Baltimore-based Design Collective, which has a picture of a combination Barnes & Noble-Hard Rock Café in neo-historic packaging on its website. That’s not the kind of design talent we need for Jumptown, but it’s probably not the designers we’ll get. In conversations with the Trail Blazers, team leadership has repeatedly emphasized that they want to build what the community wants. A local architect working with them and Cordish? No problem. A change to the Jumptown scheme? They say they’re all ears. The problem is that so far we have to make a leap of faith in believing them. The more the Blazers sign contracts and produce renderings going in the preservation direction, the more support they should garner.

It would be naïve of me (or anyone) to accept every Blazer pledge about Jumptown and to skeptically ignore Obletz’s ideas about the MARC. That’s especially true given that Obletz has provided in his numerous renderings a much more extensive look at what the MARC would actually look like. The Blazers, on the other hand, have only provided one rendering of their Coliseum plan. So an apples-to-apples comparison is tough when you’re looking at a single rendering versus about 10.

What’s more, this isn’t a black and white preservation choice even as it relates to just the Coliseum. After all, the MARC proposal has the Jumptown scheme beat in one regard: it preserves the Coliseum’s outside entry canopy and Jumptown does not. According to Trail Blazers’ Vice President J.E. Isaac, though, the team is absolutely willing to keep the canopy. And while the Blazers are now proposing a relatively hands-off approach to the Coliseum, they have previously discussed making additions to the buiding with swoopy curves, which would be utterly disastrous.

This is not a perfect process. It’s easy to get confused when we’re dealing with two Coliseum plans and only one Rose Quarter plan. And even if the Blazers’ preservation of Memorial Coliseum is preferable to Obletz’s, we’re talking about an out-of-town developer running Jumptown compared with a local developer spearheading MARC, the latter of which would be more in tune with Portland’s values. Even so, if you want to see Memorial Coliseum preserved as it is and always has been – as one of the greatest contemporary buildings in Portland, and one of the most architecturally unique large arenas anywhere in the world (it’s the only truly transparent arena) – it seems clear that the Trail Blazers are the ones looking to best preserve the Glass Palace.

What we need now is to hold the Blazers to their pledges and see more proof. We need more renderings of Memorial Coliseum as the Blazers see it in the future, and a commitment to keeping the swoopy addition plans in the waste bin. We also need the Blazers to commit to hiring a local architect. So far they have on board a superlative Portland architect, Rick Potestio, but my understanding is that he’s so far only an adviser, and is not producing designs. Ultimately, whether it’s Rick or another Portland architect/firm, the final Coliseum management agreement needs to come with a contractual provision that the winning suitor has to work with a local architect. As things stand now, it’s a little too easy for the Blazers to parade Potestio as part of their team while still relying on Cordish and Design Collective to actually provide the blueprints. Having a great Portland architect like Potestio or Brad Cloepfil, and leading the design process (not the developer), is a priority. It’s what makes Portland the design capitol it seeks to be.

Because I write this blog and am also involved in the leadership of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, it can be confusing with regard to what hat I’m wearing as I write this. So it should be said that the qualified support I’m pledging for the Blazers’ Coliseum/Rose Quarter plan is my own, and not an official Friends endorsement. And even if this were a no-holds-barred vote for the Blazers from myself and the Friends, it would be contingent on the Blazers doing and showing more before the deal is sealed. Ultimately, the National Register listing should be the real guide for how to proceed with this landmark building.

Having said all that, though, it appears today as if the Blazers have the best plan out there for truly saving Memorial Coliseum. Now we need to hold them to it.

UPDATE, 1/21/10: After reading several comments responding to the idea that I have endorsed the Blazers' Jumptown plan by writing this post, I want to clarify my remarks: I am not unequivocally supporting the overall Jumptown plan - at least not yet. I support the Blazers' plan for renovating Memorial Coliseum over the MARC plan because it's far more preservation oriented. But I also am concerned about the rest of Jumptown as the Blazers have presented it so far, in terms of the aesthetics, programming, and the use of an out-of-town developer that arguably may be out of step with Portland values. The fact that we're comparing a Coliseum plan to an overall Rose Quarter plan is indicative of this confusion.

If the Portland Trail Blazers are the favorite to win a city contract to redevelop the Rose Quarter and Memorial Coliseum, the next biggest contender is the Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex (MARC), offered by Douglas Obletz, president of the local development company Shiels Obletz Johnsen.

SOJ has developed numerous high profile projects in town, such as Museum Place downtown, which provided high density housing (by GBD Architects) on top of a Safeway (the first Safeway in the nation to have housing above the store).

Obletz, who I visited with and interviewed two weeks ago, insists the MARC proposal is not simply the endeavor of a large local developer looking to get a piece of the Rose Quarter pie. He talked about how Memorial Coliseum is a public building, and thus no private entity -- the Trail Blazers included -- should be set up to use the building as a for-profit venture. Obletz believes the RFP (request for proposal) process being employed at the end of the city's Stakeholder Advisory Committee is flawed. "The only people who can afford to go through the RFP process are the Blazers," he said. "And should they make money off public land?"

Obletz also believes the Rose Quarter is better off as what he calls a "sports village", not the entertainment district the Blazers are betting on. And his MARC proposal, drawn up by TVA Architects with an assist from architect Peter Meijer (who wrote the Coliseum's National Register application), does just that.

As many know, the MARC plan was first offered several years ago, when the Coliseum came dangerously close to becoming redeveloped into a big-box retail outlet, possibly a Home Depot. At that time, the idea of a recreation complex sounded infinitely better. However, if you were looking at the MARC plan from a Coliseum preservationist perspective, it was ominous; that initial MARC proposal would have entirely removed the Coliseum's seating bowl (now protected by the National Register listing). And TVA's renderings refashioned the original glass exterior to look like...well, like a TVA building.

Meeting with Obletz to look at his revised MARC plans earlier this month, it was clear that they had changed significantly -- and for the better. Now they include, like the Trail Blazers' proposal, an approximately 7,000-seat arena that would continue to be home to the Winter Hawks hockey team. What's more, Obletz envisions Portland State University basketball teams using the Coliseum as their home court, as well as state high school playoffs in basketball, wrestling, swimming and numerous other sports.

Although the MARC would retain an arena, the design drops the arena down a floor, so that when one entered, the top of the seating bowl would be at eye level instead of the bottom. "The existing seating bowl is completely removed in our proposal," Obletz explained. "It is replaced by a smaller diameter seating bowl with 6,500-7,500 seats. Some of this new bowl will rise above the Concourse Level, but not to the extent of the current bowl." By giving the arena a "haircut", as Obletz called it, room would be left over for a new floor above called the Field House level. These areas, along with underground spaces, would provide a bevy of athletic facilities: olympic sized swimming and diving, more basketball courts, and workout equipment.

The new Coliseum arena would also be flexible enough to provide a velodrome track, thereby incorporating Portland's burgeoning bicycle culture as well as a competing plan for the building. It would also allow for indoor track, something I've heard Nike has advocated the Blazers make a possibility for in the Jumptown plan.

Along with preserving key elements like the glass exterior and entry canopy, the National Register listing also calls for no other architecture to be touching the perimeter of the Coliseum. The MARC plan honors this, but adds a small building to the north side of the Coliseum that, while not touching the original facade, would more or less abut it with an underground passage.

Also like the Blazers' Jumptown proposal, the MARC would also make room for a sports museum. Instead of being branded by Nike, the museum would be a resurrection of the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, which used to be housed downtown.

The MARC would also move the veterans' memorial out of the sunken outdoor garden where it now exists and move it to the front of the Coliseum; this is somewhat similar to the idea the Trail Blazers have of moving the memorial to the northwest corner of the Rose Quarter.

Overall, Obletz makes a viable case that the MARC would be more successful than an entertainment complex like Jumptown at bringing Portlanders into the Rose Quarter on a daily basis. He also argues that the MARC would do more to activate residential development along Broadway (the north edge of the Rose Quarter) and in the Lloyd District without creating duplicate entertainment and restaurant venues that would otherwise compete with existing retail enclaves like Northeast Broadway, Alberta, and North Mississippi.

Personally, I would find it difficult to throw my support entirely behind the MARC because, while a seating bowl is technically retained, it still does too much from my Coliseum preservationist perspective to change the inside of the building.

At the same time, there is undeniable validity to some of what Obletz says and proposes. A public athletic center for the whole community to use on a daily basis probably would be a better course than a cluster of restaurants, bars, etc. And Obletz's company is a local developer with a long track record of generating very Portland transit-oriented developments. The Blazers' development partner, The Cordish Company of Baltimore, has a consistent history of creating banal, crassly commercial developments that seem to attract suburbanites and embarrassing racially motivated security incidents.

Obletz also argues that, while both the MARC and Jumptown would require public funding, his plan does it more honestly. His idea is for approximately 25 percent of the project to be funded with public dollars. Or as Obletz put it, "I suggested that we try to put together about 25% of the project cost from available public resources, e.g., urban renewal and coliseum reserve funds, plus private fund raising from foundations and sponsorships, and other tools like new market tax credits-- then go to the voters for the balance." As I understand it, talk in the past about Jumptown or other Rose Quarter proposals would be more likely to raid urban renewal area funds meant for the Convention Center or Interstate urban renewal districts.

“This is a defining moment for the future of the Rose Quarter, Memorial Coliseum and our city," Obletz added. "Now is the time for the citizens of Portland to step up in support of a community project that symbolizes what Portland is about. The MARC represents responsible use of public assets, promotes health and wellness, serves kids and families, preserves our architectural heritage, commemorates our veterans and enhances tourism and economic development.”

In an ideal world, we'd be able to take the best of both the Jumptown and MARC plans and merge them into one. Make it athletics-oriented rather than entertainment and bars like Obletz suggests, and keep the Coliseum a public building. But leave the arena solely an arena like the Blazers plan, and move the athletic facilities into surrounding spaces such as the massive underground area beneath the Coliseum and its adjacent plaza. Both plans already call for a sports museum and amateur athletic facilities anyway.

Assuming such a merger won't happen, we're left with some gray area. There are things to like about both Jumptown and the MARC, and things not to like. And each plan needs further vetting, both with respect to the design itself and how it would impact the community.

A public meeting is sheduled for January 26th to review the various proposals submitted.

Last Friday, January 8, was the deadline for submitting proposals to the City's Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee for redeveloping Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter.

Many ideas have now been submitted, from a roller coaster to an aquarium. But there seem to be two serious, viable proposals currently being offered: the Trail Blazers' "Jumptown" scheme, and developer Douglas Obletz's Memorial Athletic Recreation Complex.

First we'll start by looking at Jumptown and then, in the days ahead, look in depth at the MARC and any other proposals that seem to have a chance of going forward.

As it happens, both Jumptown and the MARC are surprisingly similar. Although neither scheme started out this way, both now include (1) an approximately 7,000-seat arena; (2) a sports museum; and (3) facilities for amateur fitness and recreation.

The first major difference between Jumptown and the MARC is Jumptown's broader scope. Although I believe this stage of the Advisory Committee process only called for ideas pertaining to Memorial Coliseum, Jumptown is an entire scheme for the Rose Quarter and even beyond. It envisions new buildings along the waterfront across Interstate Avenue. It imagines a new residential neighborhood north of Broadway where the massive, aging Portland Public Schools headquarters now exists. And within the Rose Quarter itself, Jumptown imagines a mix of hotel and entertainment space.

The Jumptown scheme divides the district into sub-areas such as "The Yard", consisting of the two arenas, and "Jump Street", consisting of restaurants and bars just north of the two arenas where they meet Broadway.

As has been reported by various media looking at Jumptown, the area would also include a new practice facility for the Trail Blazers, and these basketball courts and exercise areas would also be made available to the public.

With former Nike executive Larry Miller heading the team, the Blazers have also made ties with the Swoosh to possibly bring in a museum. Whether this would be a museum devoted to the history of Nike itself or to sport or Oregon sport in general is unclear. My guess is that Nike would simply take over the Oregon Sports Museum and brand it with the Swoosh. As a sports fan myself, I wouldn't mind seeing the likes of Steve Prefontaine, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods immortalized in this museum, but I'd rather it be the likes of Prefontaine, Dan Fouts and Bill Walton.

Then there is the veterans memorial, which the Blazers are contemplating moving to the northwest corner of the Rose Quarter beside the Broadway Bridge. Their proposal has this to say about the veterans:

"Our current work-in-progress approach focuses on creating better access, visibility and connectivity for the memorial aspects of the Coliseum. We intend to meet this objective in several ways. First, we’re considering a new park-like setting as a memorial, perhaps on the parcel adjacent to the Broadway Bridge, to honor Oregon veterans of all wars, not just those who served prior to 1960. Our hope is that the new space will foster contemplation and remembrance, while better connecting the memorial to the river, an important part of Portland’s shipbuilding past. Second, we believe a new iconic memorial element at the entrance to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at concourse level will increase visibility and prominence. Third, we will designate a large meeting space in the building, accessible at all hours, specifically for veterans’ gatherings and other uses as veterans see fit. Veterans have requested that this element—originally proposed during the initial construction 50 years ago—be incorporated into our approach."

I'm still trying to digest all these schemes, words, plans and ideas regarding Jumptown. But at first glance, I see things to be both excited and wary about. In terms of wary, there is the fact that the Jumptown scheme seems to remove Memorial Coliseum's entry canopy, which is protected in the building's National Register listing and is an essential part of the architecture. I also worry about this big investment in a commercial district that, based on the involvement of The Cordish Company (the Blazers' development partner) could be crassly corporate, banal and (if I may lay down a rancid stereotype) a magnet for overgrown frat boys from the suburbs.

At the same time, one has to applaud how far the Blazers have come since first discussing an entertainment zone inside the Coliseum itself. They now are committed to preserving the building as a multi-purpose arena, with only nominal changes to the seating bowl itself (something called a "party platform" at the top of the bowl). What's more, they have hired one of this generation's most talented yet underutilized architects in Portland: Rick Potestio. Having Rick on the Blazers' team helps give the Coliseum a watchdog against the ill-advised whims of Cordish.

I want to be careful about passing judgment one way or the other on Jumptown just yet. When it comes to Memorial Coliseum, I am not just an impartial blogger or journalist but an advocate for the building as part of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum leadership. What's more, it is impossible to separate completely the plans for the building versus plans for the larger Jumptown district and scheme. So far what I see is a preserved Memorial Coliseum, and I like that (the removed canopy not withstanding). I also like the density that would be added to the Rose Quarter with a highrise hotel and other projects. There hasn't yet been enough rigor applied to Jumptown other than the Coliseum to judge whether the architecture itself would be good or bad. It seems too large and ambitious at first glance, but first glances sometimes don' tell you much.

One also must touch upon the process itself. The SAC's deliberations will ultimately give way to a request for proposals - essentially acknowledging that at the end of the day this is a private, for-profit initiative. But Memorial Coliseum is a public building, and thus it's arguable that it should not be treated as a for-profit venture. I'd rather see an RFP for the rest of the Rose Quarter but something less profit oriented for the Coliseum. At the same time, I wouldn't want the process to give our beloved Blazers enough animosity or frustration to consider leaving town.

Over the days and weeks ahead, I'll be giving Jumptown further scrutiny and encourage you to do the same. And for those interested in making their voice heard (other than in Portland Architecture's lovely comments section) or just learning more about the Coliseum, PDC is hosting folks from 5:30 to 8:30 at Memorial Coliseum on January 26.

2010 began for me not in Portland, but in sunny Pasadena, California to see my beloved Oregon Ducks compete in the nation’s most storied college football game: the Rose Bowl.

Needless to say, the game’s outcome was a disappointment. Oregon hasn’t won the Rose Bowl since 1917, and I really thought going into the game that the Ducks had the better team. But Ohio State played smart, disciplined football with a star-making performance from quarterback Terrelle Pryor, and the Ducks shot themselves in the foot with mistakes.

Even so, I was absolutely blown away by the experience of seeing a football game in the Rose Bowl stadium. And it wasn’t just because I was seeing my Ducks play in the “Granddaddy of Them All”. Watching a game from the Rose Bowl is a spectacular architectural experience.

Sports stadiums for football come in two basic types: the simple bowl and the stacked deck. Bowl-shaped stadiums were once common in the early 20th century as football first became popular, but they have since been vastly outnumbered by stadiums with upper decks hovering over the field-level seats. Besides the Rose Bowl, a handful of bowl stadiums remain, such as Michigan Stadium and Notre Dame Stadium.

When attending a game in one of these football stadiums, some fans actually prefer sitting in upper-deck seats instead of at the top of a bowl, because they’re closer to the field (although higher up in the air). However, if you’re a design enthusiast, there’s no contest as to which stadium makes a purer, more beautiful building and experience: a simple and elegant bowl.

In this way, the Rose Bowl, despite being a work of 1920s modern or art deco architecture, also recalls the classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. I don’t mean that it has Doric columns or the standard base-middle-top configurations. Rather, the Rose Bowl recalls the symmetry of classical architecture: the notion that there is a spiritual quality evident in the simplicity and symmetry of form.

In ancient Rome, for example, the center of all cities was a large open square called a forum. A descendant of the Greek agora, or assembly place, the forum developed into the Roman amphitheater. Instead of terracing the seats into a hillside, the Romans tiered them within freestanding, oval buildings. If you go to Rome today and look at the ancient Colosseum, which was begun by Emperor Vespasian in AD 70 and completed a decade later by Emperor Titus, it looks very much like the stadium in Pasadena I visited on New Year’s Day.

The awe I experienced being in the Rose Bowl at its blend of massive scale and ultra refined symmetrical forms reminded me of what I love about Memorial Coliseum in Portland. It too is the absolute simplest of forms: an oval seating bowl inside a glass box. It recalls the efforts of the ancient Greeks to strive for perfection in the appearance of their buildings, finding dimensions in harmony with nature and the human body. “Symmetry and the unity of parts to the whole were important to Greek architecture,” writes Debora Dietsch in Architecture for Dummies, “as these elements reflected the democratic city-state pioneered by the Greek civilization.”

In other words, the simple sculptural beauty of Memorial Coliseum – the organically shaped oval seating bowl inside the geometrically perfect glass exterior box – is also a symbol of all that we strive for to make Portland a civic success. What’s more, like the Rose Bowl stadium, Memorial Coliseum can be celebrated as an architectural icon that is at once the most populist of places – an arena for sports and arts and rallies – as well as the most refined expression of art and design.

Over email today I conversed with another member of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, designer Randy Higgins, about this connection - between simple modern 20th century arenas and stadiums and classical Greco-Roman architecture. He had this to say:

It's important to remember that back then architecture was rocket science. It was the most significant thing a society could produce. Only societies that had established a high degree of social and economic stability could coordinate the communal and extended effort to make a building.

What happened then is the same thing happening in China and Dubai today, or in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. A society proves it has come of age by going through the effort of making something great - something previously thought impossible. In this manner the building is meant to be known not as architecture but as themata: a 'wonder.'

Memorial Coliseum was created as an example of Portland's civic identity coming into being. It was conceived as a wonder with its incredible size supported on four columns, and the design follows suite to best express that singular act so that every visitor can bear witness to the wonder of its creation.

I know some of this talk (mine or Randy's) can seem highfalutin, with all the classical references and talk of themata. But this is an essential component, in my mind, of our large public buildings and gathering places: the ability to transcend the experiences we have there.

Obviously, this isn’t meant a post about more real-life topics like the Rose Quarter planning effort or the Stakeholder Advisory Committee vetting proposals for Memorial Coliseum from amusement parks to hydroponic gardens. Instead, it’s an effort to communicate how truly special stadiums like the Rose Bowl and arenas like Memorial Coliseum are, both as community/national landmarks and as – more than 2,000 years after Western civilization first flourished in ancient Greece and Rome – a quintessential example of how the biggest places can also be the simplest and most beautiful.

As it happens, the Rose Bowl stadium will be renovated in the years ahead. But the plan is to return the structure closer to its original configuration. The first ten rows of seats on the end zone sides (where I was lucky enough to sit) will be removed so the rose bushes flanking each goal, as they did in the 1920s, will be returned. Meanwhile, we seem to float every possible idea for Memorial Coliseum except the only one that makes any sense: preserving it as a multi-purpose arena.

We can’t let the Coliseum and Rose Quarter debate be rooted entirely in issues of money, and we needn't go searching for new ideas for Memorial Coliseum. The fact is that Portland has been blessed with a very special building, a work of architecture that unites the best in contemporary and classical design. What's more, its original program as a multipurpose arena - a gathering place - is part of Memorial Coliseum's essential DNA. I already knew that, and so did many of you reading this. But after spending New Year’s Day in another gathering place with that same genius of design, it is a reminder to remain vigilant in supporting the preservation of Portland’s so-called Glass Palace — not as a fitness center, aquarium, botanical garden, amusement park or museum, but as the simple yet spectacular multipurpose arena it was born to be.

This month the Rose Quarter Citizens Advisory Committee will begin accepting proposals for how to re-invigorate Memorial Coliseum (the latter of which is pictured above in an early rendering by architect Skidmore, Owings and Merrill).

"We expect to have a range of different proposers," the Portland Development Commission's Kia Selley told Architectural Daily, Sam Bennett's blog. She added that this stage of the proposal process is “intended to be welcoming to people who don’t have a lot of development experience to get their concept out there.” Proposals are due by December 1, after which PDC will issue a request for proposals from a short list of favored ideas.

Meanwhile, timed perfectly with the opening of the proposal stage is the Portland Trail Blazers entry, dubbed "Jumptown".

The name is borrowed from the nickname this area of town had in the early to mid-20th Century when, instead of two arenas, it was home to a largely African American neighborhood and several jazz clubs like The Dude Ranch and The Chicken Coop.

The plan for Jumptown, according to its website, is "a vibrant community gathering place at the intersection of sports, music and entertainment, one that pays homage to the rich musical heritage of Portland’s eastside. Representing world-class design and best practices in green construction and operations, the project will also appropriately honor the State’s veterans."

In reality, that appears to mean preserving Memorial Coliseum but shrinking the size of its seating bowl. The Blazers want a roughly 7,000-seat arena rather than the 11,000-seat one that was originally built. In that scenario, I'd just hope they do it in a manner that changes the appearance of the bowl as little as possible. One way might be to remove seats from the bottom rather than the top, which would be less invasive to the bowl form. Another way might be to re-do the seating, giving each seat more size and leg room.

The team also envisions "music events, a variety of residential, hotel and office space, diverse retail and restaurant amenities and, potentially, a one-of-a-kind Nike interactive experience." These amenities would take up existing empty space in the Rose Quarter.

As an editorial in today's Oregonian noted, the Jumptown proposal has not articulated how much public investment would be required, and there are still questions about how the district would stay vital when there isn't an event at either arena. (The editorial was incorrect, however, in calling Memorial Coliseum "often empty". It hosted as many events as the Rose Garden last year, despite not getting the maintenance and upkeep that its bigger sister receives regularly.)

There is a lot to like - or at least some good potential to be found - in the Jumptown proposal.

For starters, the Blazers seem to have moved away from their original discussions about removing all of Memorial Coliseum's seating bowl for bars and restaurants. Instead, they see the MC being what it is: a simple, sculptural bowl in a box that represents the best of American 20th century contemporary architecture. That's very encouraging.

What's more, the idea of a hotel on the Rose Quarter site seems inspired. It would help bring activity to the district during the crucial there's-no-game-or-concert-happening periods. It seems unlikely that Portland will build a massive headquarters hotel in this area like Mayor Adams wants, but adding a regular sized hotel here would be a step in that direction without such massive subsidies.

A Nike interactive museum could act as a very successful magnet for the district. The Oregon Sports Hall of Fame was a dismal failure and a tremendous disappointment when it was located downtown near the Multnomah County Courthouse. If Nike could give Oregon a higher quality sports museum, it would be a huge cultural boom for the city and would finally, finally give the athletics giant a more substantial connection with Portland after sequestering itself in a bermed-in Beaverton campus for the last few decades. (The Oregon Ducks' last two football uniform designs could be part of an exhibit called "What not to do: adventures in faux diamond plating and gladiatorial wings." But in fairness, another exhibit could profile the perfect genius of their 'O' logo design.)

It's not to say that the Blazers should be given a free pass on Jumptown without further articulation of their plans. The team could still wind up altering the Coliseum's seating bowl far too much, or their development partner in Baltimore, the Cordish Company, could wind up suggesting some sort of ill-advised addition to the Coliseum's exterior that looks as hideous as the One Center Court building that the team built next door to the Rose Quarter.

Even so, in talking with the Blazers from time to time, I've been pleasantly surprised and undeniably impressed with team leaders like team president Larry Miller and vice president J.E. Isaac. These are not yes men taking orders from Paul Allen and Vulcan, or pushovers acquiescing to their developer's crass, heavy handed design sensibilities. They've been working with a talented local architect, Rick Potestio, as a design advisor (as well as Nike's Tinker Hatfield), and hopefully that will yield fruit.

Meanwhile, though, I'm skeptical about the mayor's Citizens Advisory Committee receiving any other serious proposals. Sure, there have been ideas for a velodrome or an arts center, but I'm yet to see any evidence of full-on submissions being made for these or other ideas with funding mechanisms in place. Anyone can suggest an idea, but ultimately the Committee will only go forward with ideas that have backing. Even the most high-profile alternative idea to the Blazers', developer Douglas Obletz's proposal for a Memorial Amateur Recreation Complex, may not go forward in this city-sanctioned process. And even if there are some ideas proposed, ones with funding in place, the process going forward is PDC's standard developer-driven one. Might something else like a design competition have been better?

Still, we've come a long way from the days earlier this spring when Timbers/Beavers owner Merritt Paulson (son of George W. Bush cabinet member Henry Paulson), Mayor Adams and City Commissioner Randy Leonard were trying to build a minor league baseball stadium on the Coliseum site. This would not only have destroyed one of the city's most important architectural landmarks, but it also would have been bad for the Rose Quarter, hosting vastly fewer events than the Coliseum does today and detracting from Portland's rise to become a major-league sports city.

I shouldn't even dignify his childish antics with a response, but it's also disappointing to see Leonard even as recently as this Monday in a Mark Larabee-reported Oregonian story still trying to float the baseball-in-the-Rose-Quarter idea and calling the Coliseum a "Costco". Leonard is in many ways a smart, tough, principled man, but his design sensibility is a laughable embarrassment that represents the worst in an elected official: cynicism, ignorance and arrogance disguised as trite populism. I know Randy Leonard is capable of being a much better City Councilor, and a bigger man, than this.

And in case you think I'm merely vilifying someone who disagrees with yours truly about design, it's not about that. It's not about Leonard's aesthetic opinion versus mine. An overwhelming array of preservation and design organizations, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US Green Building Council and the American Institute of Architects have all weighed in on this, calling for Memorial Coliseum's preservation.

It's also disappointing that the one group of people other than Leonard who seem to vehemently want to "grenade" Memorial Coliseum, as one commenter put it on the Blazers' Jumptown website, are Timbers soccer team supporters. Perhaps they worry that the Timbers' jump to Major League Soccer will fall apart if the Timbers' reconfiguration of PGE Park as a soccer-only facility is hampered by the Beavers (Paulson owns both teams) not finding a home. I personally would argue against cutting off your nose to spite your face. The best scenario remains for the MC to be preserved, and the Beavers and Timbers each to have a proper home of their own that's not on the Rose Quarter site.

Thankfully, though, despite the questionable effect of the Advisory Committee, the potential lack of properly funded ideas, the challenge of getting the Blazers to listen more to talented local designers than corporate developers, and the smear campaign against a modernist local landmark by one city leader, Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter just might turn out to be a success.

Last night was a major treat: seeing my/our beloved Portland Trail Blazers return for a game at the arena where they began, the building where the team won the 1977 NBA championship as well as Western Conference titles in 1990 and 1992.

Even if Memorial Coliseum was a piece of junk, a work of architecture without distinction, it would have been fun to see the Blazers play in their old house. But as it happens, the building was a star of the show.

I loved thinking of Blazer fans who are regulars at the Rose Garden now, but were also frequently at Blazer games in the Coliseum before that, coming to the MC now and seeing the differences between the two buildings - not so much the missing video screens or electronic stat boards, but the greater intimacy at the Coliseum, more closeness to the action. My seat for last night's game was only about six or seven rows from the top, but it felt about the same as a seat only halfway up in the Rose Garden.

The team made the slam-dunk decision to leave open the curtain that usually blocks off views from the inside seating bowl through the glass box. I attended countless Blazer games in the 1980s at the MC, but I never have attended an actual NBA game there with the curtain open.

So as the likes of Greg Oden, Brandon Roy and Phoenix's Steve Nash competed on the court, fans were treated not only to the game but a view of Portland at dusk. My seats had their back to the downtown side, so I didn't have as good a view as people on the other side of the court. But I could still see through the glass the glowing twin spires of the Oregon Convention Center. And those sitting across the court were able to look out at the downtown skyline.

Maybe it was just my over-excited imagination, but I could almost swear that the Coliseum was louder than the Rose Garden. Granted the RG can hold 19,000 and the last night's sold out game had 11,700. But perhaps the greater intimacy of the arena meant that the acoustic levels went up. That and the fact that this was an incredibly raucous crowd for a preseason game.

Obviously sitting in the Coliseum watching the game, it was impossible not to think of the recent past with a battle to save the building, or to think of the future and wonder what this building will be renovated into. Although the mayor's Rose Quarter advisory committee is still open to any number of options, I'm very glad to see that the Trail Blazers franchise has moved away from the idea of removing the seating bowl or even a large chunk of it, and if the team retains control of the MC the seating bowl will likely remain intact. If the bowl does get altered, it now seems more likely that the team would merely remove some of the top of the bowl, which personally I see as a much better alternative to removing one side of it.

The Blazers lost the game to the Suns (which is OK because it's preseason), who coincidentally were the Blazers' final opponent in this building before moving to the Rose Garden in the 1990s. Also coincidental is the fact that Phoenix also once had an arena called Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the Suns played. But Phoenix, a very different city from Portland, did not see fit to retain their old arena. Maybe that's okay, though. After all, their building may have a similar name, but Phoenix never had a glass palace.

On Tuesday of this week, Mayor Sam Adams convened the second meeting of the Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee. After spending the first meeting getting to know each other, the committee this time sat down for what was called "Rose Quarter 101", a series of presentations on the history of the development.

First up was author Bob Dietsche, who wrote the book "Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957". Dietche talked about a parade of clubs that once were located up and down North Williams Avenue as well as the area near what is now the Rose Quarter: The Dude Ranch, Lil' Sandy's, McClendon's Rhythm Room, and The Chicken Coop. Portland's population increased significantly during the World War II years with blue-collar shipyard jobs available, particularly its African American population, and the array of clubs and performers catered to those seeking fanciful escape.

Next up were myself and architect Stuart Emmons. On behalf of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, we gave a talk on the history of the Coliseum and what makes it great from an architectural and cultural perspective. It was certainly a tall order given that we only were given 10 minutes. But the response from the committee was overwhelmingly positive. "I think you won the day," one told us. "I had no idea," another said.

I'm going to include here some of the slides we used in our PowerPoint presentation, which you can also download in its entirety here.

This first slide reached back to one of the finalists for what to name the building. Along with the Memorial Coliseum name and strange ideas like 'The Vetarena' or 'The Rosarena', it was suggested the building be named 'The Glass Palace' to emphasize that it is virtually the only arena in the nation or the world that is completely transparent.

We also, of course, wanted to emphasize that Memorial Coliseum is an engineering marvel. I happened to notice as we were giving the presentation that the conference room in which the committee was meeting at the Portland Development Commission had about six columns. That means this single conference room, no more than about 500 square feet, had more columns than the Coliseum does, even thought the Coliseum takes up four city blocks.

Next we tried to put Memorial Coliseum's design and construction in a national, cultural context. The building was completed the same year that JFK was elected president, and during the dawn of the space age. It was a time of superlative midcentury modern design and a sense of optimism about a new era.

We endeavored to show the committee some past restorations and expansions of classic architecture that has made the original design a centerpiece, complemented by new programming that enhances but does not compromise what was there.

Even though the Friends of Memorial Coliseum is unequivocally against any renovation that removes the seating bowl from the arena, or changes the building so as to have a different function from a working arena, we wanted to emphasize to the committee that overall we are still very much open to and even embracing of other design changes. There is a lot of room for improvement in the portion of the Coliseum outside the seating bowl but inside the glass box, for example. Memorial Coliseum also desperately needs a better design for accessing its veterans memorial.

And while it would be a mistake to expand either inside the box or attached to the building (a glass palace needs breathing room to see out and to see into), there are bountiful opportunities to expand into under-utilized Rose Quarter space, such as the riverfront (hello-huge opportunity), to the north and south surface parking lots, and into the east plaza. And let's not forget the gargantuan amount of underground space that could be enlivened with a solution like the Louvre's.

You can't say everything in 10 or 15 minutes. There is so much more we would have liked to share with the committee, and hopefully we will do that either face to face or at a future meeting. Even so, when Mayor Adams asked each member of the 32-person committee to share his or her thoughts following the presentation, the response was unequivocal. Member after member of the committee talked about having not fully grasped what a special work of modernist architecture Memorial Coliseum truly is, what a diamond in the rough it has been these past several years, and what fools we have been to keep the best part of the Coliseum hidden most of the time by closing a curtain around the free-standing seating bowl.

The Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee is meeting roughly every two weeks, putting the next meeting on Tuesday, October 13. That date, by the way, is one day before the Trail Blazers play an exhibition basketball game at Memorial Coliseum, the glass palace where they won the world championship.

Tuesday of this week was a big day in the history of Memorial Coliseum. Maybe the biggest since Clyde the Glide dueled with MJ.

First, media outlets began reporting by midday that the building had received a listing on the National Register of Historic Places from the National Park Service, giving the 1960 structure protection as a landmark of enduring architectural merit and historic significance. (Congratulations and thanks to architect Peter Meijer and his colleague Kristin Minor for writing the nomination.)

Later on Tuesday afternoon at City Hall, the first meeting was held by the Rose Quarter Development Project Stakeholder Advisory Committee, charged by the city with determining a future use for both Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter overall. The meeting, held in City Council chambers, was chaired by Mayor Sam Adams.

First, the National Register listing. For those who have worked over these past several months to protect Memorial Coliseum since it was first threatened with demolition to make way for a minor-league baseball stadium (a plan since abandoned), it's time to pop the champagne cork. Memorial Coliseum is, according to a wide swath of experts at the national, local and state level, a landmark work of architecture worth preserving. It follows in the same line of preserved Portland landmarks like the Pittock Mansion, the Portland Armory, Central Library, and the Ladd Carriage House, all local treasures that were at one time threatened.

Our city doesn't have a perfect record of historic preservation. To save the Coliseum, though, is a bold statement that Portland is different. Not many American cities save their old arenas once they're replaced. That Portland plans to give the Coliseum new life is a gesture not only a pioneering spirit, but of sustainable values. And we're supposed to be running for the title of America's greenest city.

Some people out there ask, what's so great about Memorial Coliseum? Why preserve it? Several reasons. It's unique in the world as an entirely glass-covered arena that, with the curtain around the seating bowl open, can be flooded with natural light. You can sit in the so-called worst seats at Memorial Coliseum and have something people in the front row don't: a view of the entire downtown Portland skyline. Unfortunately, though, even native Oregonians who grew up going to Blazer games and rock concerts there largely have never experienced Memorial Coliseum in this way.

A few weeks ago I visited the City of Portland archives and found a folder full of correspondence between civic leaders and community members about what to name the building. One of the runners-up to the name Memorial Coliseum I find fittingly descriptive: "The Glass Palace".

The whole concept behind Memorial Coliseum's design, says Bill Rouzie, one of the designers of Memorial Coliseum for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was to give the arena a sense of transparency and connection to the outside - something anathema to most large performance spaces. "We were thinking, we’ve got this oval bowl that is going to sit in a glass box," the architect recalls. "When you’re in the bowl looking at something happening, you can either have light or not with the control of the curtain. To get out of there, or at halftime, you walk out into a space and instead of being in some blind corridor, you come out and you’ve got glass and you can see the city. You know where you are, and whether it’s day or night."

"That was the whole point of the design," Rouzie adds. "You never feel lost there. I can even get lost in some of the buildings I've designed, especially the hospitals. But not the Coliseum."

What's more, Memorial Coliseum has a pureness of design though few other buildings achieve. It's simply a bowl in a box. You can draw the basic form in less than three seconds: a square with an open half-oval inside. You can see the building's basic form from blocks away. It's a visual language of modern architecture - glass and steel - but the Coliseum has a touch of classical symmetry ascribed to the great buildings of ancient Greece and Rome.

Then there's the fact that Memorial Coliseum (pictured below in a shot by Jeremy Bitterman) was designed by one of the great American architecture firms of the 20th Century: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects behind the Sears Tower in Chicago, Lever House in New York, and Oregon buildings like the Standard Plaza in Portland and Autzen Stadium in Eugene. They're also designing the Freedom Tower in New York (with Daniel Liebeskind), replacement for the World Trade Center.

It was just hours after reports of the the National Register listing began running that the Rose Quarter Stakeholder Advisory Committee met at City Hall. There are 32 members of the committee. If you've ever held a meeting in a big conference room where everyone wants and needs to weigh in, you know having that many people on the committee will be challenging. But the plus side to a large committee is many people have a voice, including members of organizations like the Urban League, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, and the American Institute of Architects as well as neighborhood activists and even a kid attending public school in Portland, Jules Renaud.

Not much happened at the first SAC meeting, mostly just a meet and greet. In his opening remarks to the committee, Mayor Adams said, "We are better situated than ever before," to successfully transform the Rose Quarter. His reasoning? Portland now has experience in successfully redeveloping neighborhoods like the Pearl and South Waterfront. There is a transit confluence at the Rose Quarter as well, with streetcars set to join the existing MAX train and bus hub.

When asked, Adams also said, "I am not committed to saving the bowl," but he does want the exterior glass perimeter to remain "largely intact."

The committee took time for each member to express his or her initial concern going into this series of 20 meeting sessions. It proved somewhat fruitful as a beginning point for generating ideas and forming collective values. Among the comments and concerns I jotted down were:

The economic and scale issues associated with having two large arenas

Physical barriers like the railroad running along the river

Mobility for cyclists and pedestrians

How Rose Quarter events match up with locals' leisure time preferences

Whether to restore the street grid that predated the Coliseum/RQ

How this relates to (and jives with) the revitalization of NE Broadway

Last Friday I visited the City of Portland's archives buiding, which surprisingly are in a tiny brick building in a park on Columbia Boulevard that used to be a garbage incinerator. "The irony is not lost on us," one staffer told me of the building's past.

As it happened, though, there was a wealth of written information and images of the building. This wasn't just a matter of history or nostalgia, though. Pouring over old correspondence, announcements, brochures from the men and women who planned and built Memorial Coliseum, it was clear they knew they had a world-class architectural landmark on their hands. And with the local office of legendary NYC-Chicago based architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, they had the talent to deliver.

It's almost impossible to convey how futuristic and optimistic a building Memorial Coliseum would have seen to a society less than 20 years removed from World War II. Memorial Coliseum, city leaders believed, would transform the city of Portland and make it a city of the world: a city that mattered.

Whatever our city has now begun to establish as of 2009 in terms of continual New York Times features and hordes of young creatives moving here, it's a brand that, long before green building, urban planning, bike culture or farm-to-table cuisine, Memorial Coliseum represented Portland's greatest ambitions in a time when ambitions mattered. This was a time when America would begin exploring space, when we made the coolest cars and movies and music, and when we built glass palaces.

"Picture with me, if you will, a dramatic landmark rising on the banks of the Willamette some 90 feet in height which will command an impressive view of the downtown area across the river," wrote Don Jewell, the Coliseum's first general manager, in a speech to city leaders in 1958, two years before the building was completed.

"At night, the illuminated glass arena building will be seen from many points of the city, as well as from the major highways, rail lines and the air."

"Unlike any other coliseum in the nation - or perhaps the world - Portland's new center will feature an exterior glass curtain wall extending a block and a half square."

One file in the archives was devoted to suggested names for what would be christened Memorial Coliseum. I got a chuckle from two one-word monikers: the "Vetarena" and the "Rosearena". There was also a suggestion for the "Rose Colosseum, the "Beaver Dam" (thank goodness that didn't succeed) and, my personal favorite: THE GLASS PALACE. I actually wish they would have chosen this over Memorial Coliseum. If they did, maybe more Portlanders today would realize, or have the chance to peer beyond the deterioration and the outer perimeter of trees blocking its transparency and see how special and unique a work of architecture this building is.

Another file held correspondence involving The Beatles' 1965 concert in Portland. The invitation to the Fab Four came in part because they already had concerts scheduled in Los Angeles and Seattle. "Everyone knows," an invitation letter explained, "that all flights from Los Angeles to Seattle stop for a layover in Portland."

But there was one major problem: the Beatles could only play in Portland on one date, but the American Legion already. At first, the Legion didn't want to budge. They wouldn't change the date. That is, until Jewell threatened to tell the media that the American Legion was keep The Beatles out of Portland. Suddenly the American Legion changed its mind. Hey Don, on behalf of my mom, who was lucky enough to attend that concert, I say, "We love you ya-ya-ya!"

Meanwhile, Mayor Sam Adams' office has chosen the 32 members of the Rose Quarter Citizen Advisory Committee. There are two excellent choices for the committee from the architecture community: Joseph Readdy, a member of the AIA Urban Design Committee, and Paul Falsetto, head of the AIA's Historic Resources Committee and an expert on midcentury modernism. But the committee is disappointingly large. A colleague of mine spoke of once being on an 18-member committee and having that too big to get things done. I worry the architectural community's influence and expertise will be drowned in a pool of specialized interests.

We in the small five person group leading Friends of Memorial Coliseum (Stuart Emmons, Rick Potestio, Peter Meijer, Don Rood, myself) were also disappointed not to have one of our members on the Committee. But I plan to attend all of the meetings, each of which I believe will include time for public testimony.

What's more, it's a good democratic exercise for this body to be formed and for a variety of ideas to be vetted

I just hope at the end of the day that Committee members remember they have a landmark on their hands, and a multi purpose arena that is capable of the flexibility and has the extra space to host a velodrome, an amateur athletic complex, or anything else people dream up. Hopefully the committee will see that Memorial Coliseum is the Rose Quarter's greatest enduring resource, and that it's the rest of the development - the parking garage fronting Broadway, the untapped riverfront - that needs the most attention.

For the first time since the team moved into the Rose Garden next door in 1995, this season the Portland Trail Blazers will play a game in their original home: Memorial Coliseum.

Granted it's a preseason game, but who cares?

This is the building where Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas and company became world champions on June 5, 1977. It's where the team first took the court in 1970 behind star rookie Geoff Petrie. It's where Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter broke the team scoring and assist records during the same 1986-87 campaign, only for Drexler to break the scoring record again two years lter. And it's where the Trail Blazers established the longest streak of sold-out games in American professional sports history: 814 straight games from 1977 until the team moved to the Rose Garden in 1995.

The preseason game will be agaist Phoenix, the last team the Blazers played in the Coliseum before the move. That also makes me think of one of the greatest all-time Blazer games, played in the Coliseum during the 1990 Western Conference Finals, in which Drexler and company overcame a 23-point fourth quarter deficit to win.

Besides Blazer history, Memorial Coliseum is also where UCLA won the 1965 Final Four behind coach John Wooden, who yesterday was named by The Sporting News as the greatest coach in American sports history. It's also where the first-ever American Olympic basketball team made of professional players, the "Dream Team", played is inaugural game, a 79-point victory over Cuba that I was lucky enough to attend.

The exhibition game will be held on October 14, so by that time of year it's likely the sun will have set by a 7:00 or 7:30 tipoff. Even so, it woud be an extra-special treat for the game at Memorial Coliseum to be held with the upper seating bowl curtain open, so fans attending the game can look out through this entirely transparent glass palace at the Portland downtown skyline.

The Blazers franchise has a difficult task ahead of it if they wind up being the ones overseeing the Rose Quarter redevelopment. There's not only the Coliseum's future to figure out and how it relates to the Rose Garden, but there's the broader need to transform the whole Rose Quarter itself, from the untapped resource of a riverfront setting to the fact that an ugly parking garage acts as the front door. They're also working with developer, The Cordish Company, that is not known for crafting authentic, local business-oriented developments that welcome people of all ethnicities.

Even so, it's encouraging to know that Blazers president Larry Miller and his front office team seem to understand that so many of us, Blazer fans and design enthusiasts and those with civic pride in historic places (many of which overlap), care a great deal about Memorial Coliseum.

This isn't about the ongoing dilemma of where to put a minor league baseball stadium, or whether an invasion of Applebees and Hard Rock Cafe (or even something good like a sports museum) could come to the Rose Quarter. It's about celebrating the past, both in sports and in architecture, as the city prepares to re-imagine this glass palace. It's also about celerating the rich, nearly 40-year history of our beloved Blazers with the team returning to its roots.

Sorry for the short notice on this, but today (Tuesday) at 5:30PM, the City Club of Portland will be hosting a free tour of Memorial Coliseum. The tour will be led by architect Rick Potestio, who has been part of the campaign to save the building, as well as Rose Quarter guest services coordinator Laura Doyle.

Over the weeks and months as the Coliseum preservation battle has been waged, it has been easy to get distracted from the merits of the building itself. For those who can make it, today's Coliseum tour is a chance to start over and look at this architectural gem with your own eyes.

If you go on the tour, here are some things to think about: specifically, the relationship between the freestanding concrete seating bowl and the surrounding glass box. No other arena in the United States or the world has an interior seating area that is completely open to light and views of the outside world. In Memorial Coliseum, the seats closest to the top that might be called "nosebleed seats" in other arenas may actually be the best seats in the house when the MC's curtain is open, allowing visitors to gaze out at the Portland skyline.

Visitors on the tour will also see a building that in some places has very noticeable disrepair. The ceiling is stained as if from a hundred thousand cigarette smokers, and one side of the seating bowl has some horribly crass structural bracing added to the exterior. But Memorial Coliseum is in excellent structural condition. With the right TLC, its cosmetic disrepair could easily be transformed back into the look of a state-of-the-art arena.

Besides the architecture itself, the Rose Quarter's Laura Doyle may also point out that Memorial Coliseum hosted just as many events as the Rose Garden arena next door: more than 150 events last year. That makes the Coliseum much more viable as a community building than any baseball stadium on this site would be.

In the weeks and months ahead, the city and its Citizens Advisory Committee being put together by the Portland Development Commission will look at a number of potential uses: a velodrome, an arts center, high speed rail, an amateur athletic facility. If touring Memorial Coliseum today, perhaps one could try and imagine these different purposes, and how they would affect the original Coliseum architecture - specifically the relationship between the curving seating bowl and the linear box of the glass exterior.

Or if you're like me, you might want to just stand on the ground floor of Memorial Coliseum and think back to that day in June 1977 when our beloved Trail Blazers became world champions of basketball in Portland's glass palace. And that's saying nothing of Obama's speech there last year, the Beatles concert in 1960, or any of the other events that have taken place inside the transparent box. Or, as legendary poet Allen Ginsberg called it, "The New World Auditorium".

For those attending today, please RSVP by email to amy@pdxcityclub.org.

One other related note about the Coliseum: Last week, America's most acclaimed architectural photographer, Julius Shulman, passed away at the age of 98. Schulman was most famous for his photos of California architecture, such as the famed Case Study Houses in Los Angeles. But the one Portland building Schulman photographed was Memorial Coliseum. What's more, a few weeks ago shortly before his death, Schulman's daughter told a friend of mine, interior designer Rosanne Sachson, that when they would look at his pictures together Schulman would often stop at the Coliseum to express his admiration for the building.

If you'd like to read further about Memorial Coliseum, I have written two recent articles about the building, its history and the preservation campaign, for Architecture Week magazine and The Architects Newspaper.

Last week the Memorial Coliseum received a huge lift to its preservation effort. As Oregon Public Broadcasting first reported, the building received unanimous approval from the state historic preservation office in its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.

The nomination was forwarded by local architect Peter Meijer, one of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum. And part of its unanimous approval comes from support for the building's preservation from organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US Green Building Council, and the American Institute of Architects.

Although Memorial Coliseum still must be approved at the national level for final listing on the National Register, the national level rarely, if ever, rejects the recommendations at the state or local level. In all likelihood the Coliseum will be listed officially this fall. That will make it much more difficult, although still not impossible, for it to be demolished. And the National Register can not be swayed by mere political will or fancy - only the good of architecture.

Which is a good thing, because two pieces in today's Oregonian raise the ugly specter of demolishing the building once again.

I want to be careful about addressing Steve Duin's column, because Steve is my favorite Oregonian writer and someone I have a lot of respect and admiration for.

But reading his column, "Coliseum still the future of baseball", I was gravely disappointed. It seemed like Commissioner Randy Leonard had a conversation with Steve and Steve was taking notes. There are ample quotes from Leonard, who makes sport once again of crass, ignorant name calling of this historic building, such as "a really good looking Costco." The only other quote in the story is from urban naturalist Mike Houck, who expresses surprise that the Coliseum was taken off the table in favor of Lents Park, the greenspace he seeks to defend.

So in other words, Duin did not speak to anyone on the opposing side. In fact, he never has. Duin apparently is not a fan of, or does not appreciate, modern architecture. That's fair enough. I am not a fan of, and do not appreciate, country music. But as a journalist, I'd argue that he has a responsibility to at least hear out the other side. Out of all the Coliseum supporters I've talked to, none of them have ever spoken with Steve Duin. Of course he writes a column, not news reports, so perhaps he's not beholden to the notion that you have to get both sides of the story. Still, for someone who has been a terrific columnist for so long, I expect more than merely resorting to name calling and closing one's ears to the complete argument.

Duin also implies that Mayor Sam Adams is the only one holding up the Coliseum from being razed so a baseball stadium can be built there. And he outright accuses the supporters of only being "a plucky bunch of architects". It's a nice rhetorical device: he's trying to isolate Coliseum supporters and make us look smaller than we are. But it's not the truth. It isn't merely a bunch of architects working to save the Coliseum. Our effort has included neighborhood leaders, people from the arts community, and people who don't fit any particular categorization but just want to see the building saved.

By the way, if you are one of the non-architect supporters of the Coliseum reading this, please consider writing Steve Duin, at steveduin@news.oregonian.com, to let him know you are out there and his lazy stereotype of only architects working to save the building is untrue.

The Oregonian's editorial board also weighed in on the Coliseum, and they too are not exactly model preservationists. But the board actually had more of a measured tone. They argue that the Coliseum needs a purpose, and that it shouldn't sit in disrepair. Absolutely right! Even Coliseum preservationists and the Friends of Memorial Coliseum don't want the building to remain status-quo. It needs a renovation and a clearer purpose, no question. That's what will come out of the citizens advisory committee and the public process for Memorial Coliseum happening this fall.

What we already know is this: shoehorning a baseball stadium into the Rose Quarter site does very little to resolve the issues this site has faced since its inception. This is a suburban solution in one of our most important urban settings.

I've written a lot of angry rhetoric in the last couple months about Memorial Coliseum, and feel no desire to go on the warpath today. No accusing Steve Duin of being Marcus Brutus, no calling Leonard an Ernest clone, and no characterizing the editorial board as philistines. Even so, it saddens me greatly that these clearly informed, intelligent, veteran journalists don't understand the value of landmark contemporary architecture, a building that is treasured by the community and has international recognition and renown. Of course, this is the same struggle that all of Portland's most treasured historic buildings and places once faced: the Pittock Mansion, the Ladd Carriage House, the Skidmore Historic District. Hopefully the Coliseum can ultimately outlive the jaws of the present to continue its history.

For those interested in joining and supporting the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, we will have a website up and running soon, and will have a lot more to say and to show this community about the majority that supports the Coliseum's preservation.

The situation involving Timbers MLS soccer in PGE Park, Beavers baseball...somewhere, and the future of Memorial Coliseum is in a kind of limbo right now.

City Council has de-coupled the PGE Park soccer renovation plan from the fate of the Beavers, meaning the plan to upgrade PGE as a soccer-only facility can go forward to meet its stipulated September timeline without being threatened by the Beavers' open-ended search for a new home.

That's particularly important given that Lents is now officially out as a potential location for Beavers baseball. In the weeks ahead, the City will be making a final search for a ballpark site that keeps the Beavers in Portland or, at the very least, in the metro area.

Suburban sites like Hillsboro or Clark County have been suggested for a Beavers park, and here in Portland proper there have been numerous inner-city sites proposed: Delta Park, the Terminal 1 former shipyard facility, the Oregonian's vacant property in Northwest Portland, South Waterfront, the Lloyd Cinemas parking lot, among others.

Personally, I feel that PGE Park has never been completely or properly examined as a home for both the Timbers and Beavers.

Clearly Major League Soccer is opposed to having both soccer and baseball played in any of its venues. That's because the league, quite justifiably, believes strongly in having a quality fan experience that also translates well for television: namely, having all four sides of the soccer field lined with seating. So in the upcoming soccer-only renovation, you'll see seats moved much closer to the field. And that's a good thing for fans.

Baseball and football fans can also remember the days in the 1970s and '80s when a slough of multipurpose stadiums brought a compromised experience to both sports. Whether it was Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, or Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, these were bland circular concrete cookie-cutter stadiums who nobody was that sorry to see go.

Even so, I think Portland's culture of strong design and innovation could chart the course for a new kind of multi-purpose stadium, one where the experience is as good as single-use stadiums but the wastefulness of building entire buildings for individual sports is abandoned for its unsustainability.

PGE Park is basically in need of a design solution. We need the Timbers to be able to play with the field surrounded by fans. And then we need the Beavers to be able to play on that same field with some of that seating removed to make way for the extended outfield. But that is absolutely doable with today's seating technologies.

Whether it's Audience Systems from the United Kingdom, Australian Seating Systems in Australia, or Spanish and US-based Figueras International Seating, there are numerous companies around the world that could create retractible seating for PGE Park that would help the Timbers and Beavers co-locate there while keeping both soccer and baseball fans happy.

In conversations recently with seating experts, I was told that it would be preferable at PGE Park if there could be retractible seating that is simply moved rather than temporary seating that must be disassembled. And that would be a more expensive proposition. But as it happens, Portland Beavers and Timbers owner Merritt Paulson is planning to spend many millions upgrading PGE Park.

Having an innovative solution at PGE Park that houses both the Beavers and Timbers but does so in a way that delivers optimal fan viewing would be a major design innovation that the rest of the world would take notice of. We've been in an era over the last ten to twenty years where teams build single-use stadiums. But that has happened in an unprecedented economic boom time. Returning to multi-use stadiums but doing so in a new, innovative way is precisely the kind of sustainable innovation Portland ought to aspire to. It would also solve a political soap opera that has been going on too long.

Meanwhile, although it's probably better not to even dignify it with a response, a reader named Samuel Baron of Fairview in Portland's outer outer suburbs chimed in today with an op-ed in The Oregonian arguing that Memorial Coliseum be torn down for a Beavers ballpark at the Rose Quarter. Luckily Mayor Adams and the Portland Trail Blazers have both adamantly said this will not happen. But just in case anyone reads that op-ed and is swayed, keep in mind this rebuttal.

Baron is admittedly new to the Portland area, having relocated from Baltimore. He thinks that city's now-gone Memorial Stadium is the same situation as Memorial Coliseum. Memorial Stadium in Baltimore had "outlived its usefulness" and was demolished. By that rationale, Baron says, our Coliseum should too. He even recounts how the cramped Baltimore neighborhood where Memorial Stadium was razed was relieved to have it gone.

But Memorial Stadium was not the unique work of architecture that Memorial Coliseum is. And Baltimore is not Portland. Is this what passes for informed commentary in the city's daily newspaper? Some guy from Baltimore piping up that we should get with the demolition program like his east coast hometown? Please. Couldn't we at least have a longtime Portlander making this wrong argument?

Hopefully the City Council knows better. (Luckily the Blazers already do.) These trite, tired arguments for razing the Coliseum have all been aired in the past months, and the community rose up in opposition. Sometimes buildings' value does not come only from their purpose, but from the relationship architecture has with the people of its community. Face it, Samuel Baron, Portlanders cherish Memorial Coliseum and are not going to follow the lemmings' path of destroying are most cherished buildings.

A report on the front page of today's Oregonian by Ted Sickinger and City Hall reporter Mark Larabee seems to indicate that Portland's landmark Memorial Coliseum could once again be considered as the site for a baseball stadium.

"Coliseum numbers better than Lents site," the headline reads.

The story goes on to say that a city-produced study has found that Lents Park, the proposed site of the stadium, "falls short on almost every measure - attendance, development prospects, ticket revenue and parking - compared with the former front-running site at Memorial Coliseum."

Nobody in the story, from the City Council to Merritt Paulson (none of whom are pictured at right), is yet suggesting that attention be turned back to demolishing the Coliseum. But that is the clear logical extension.

The story does quote Council member Randy Leonard, who points out a a major flaw in the study, conducted by HVS International. It calls Lents a suburb, and uses numbers from previous suburban stadiums with lesser revenue numbers. To some this might seem like splitting hairs, but it's an important distinction. Lents is an outer neighborhood in Portland, but because Portland is not a sprawled-out metro area like most big cities in America, it's much more easily accessible from the center of the city than most suburbs would be in this country.

More importantly, the point to be made here is that if City Council, Merritt Paulson or anyone else makes a second attack on Memorial Coliseum, that effort will be met with a ceaseless chorus of opposition.

Memorial Coliseum is one of the great works of architecture ever built in the city of Portland. It is designed by a legendary architecture firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, representing the best of mid-20th century building with a combination of engineering prowess and transparency to make an arena unlike any other in the world: one with natural light pouring through.

Just like Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Pietro Belluschi-designed Portland Art Museum and Equitable Building, the Pittock Mansion, the Ladd Carriage House, the Benson Bubblers, the Park Blocks, the Jackson Tower and other beloved landmarks in this city, Portland and its people will not let stand some ridiculous plan to destroy our most beloved architecture in the name of a baseball stadium a few thousand at best will ever visit, or a minor-league team few in the city care about.

If you are reading this and feel even half as strongly as I do about preserving Portland's history and saving this exceptional work of architecture, please consider contacting City Council to say this: Don't even think about trying to tear down Memorial Coliseum.

Mayor Sam Adams

Phone: (503)823-4120

Email: Samadams@ci.portland.or.us

Commissioner Randy Leonard

Phone: (503)823-4682

Email: randy@ci.portland.or.us

Commissioner Amanda Fritz

Phone: (503) 823-3008

Email: amanda@ci.portland.or.us

Commissioner Nick Fish

Phone: (503) 823-3589

Email: nick@ci.portland.or.us

Commissioner Dan Saltzman

Phone: (503)823-4151

Email: dsaltzman@ci.portland.or.us

Meanwhile, here is a copy of the previously-posted letter from the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

Dear Mayor Adams:

On behalf of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we are writing to express our support for the preservation of Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. We were alarmed to learn of your proposal to demolish this architecturally-significant modernist building and brazen pledge to seek City Council approval for demolition within a month. As detailed below, the unique qualities of this structure and its importance to the community require a careful evaluation of alternatives before demolition is considered. We are also highly skeptical of claims that the demolition of this Portland landmark is a “sustainable” solution. In fact, demolition followed by new construction would be a dramatic step backward in Portland’s goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable city.

The Memorial Coliseum is an historic building that contributes significantly to the community of Portland and the State of Oregon. Designed 1958-1960 by the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (established in 1936 in Chicago), the Coliseum is architecturally notable for its cantilevered steel-truss roof floating over a free-standing concrete arena bowl, the whole enclosed by a glass curtain wall. An all-glass exterior façade is an uncommon treatment for arenas of this era. The rarity of this style contributes to structure’s historic significance.

With the successful reuse of this building, Portland can demonstrate its leadership in the preservation of historic architecture and work cooperatively towards developing a practical model for communities that are debating new uses for their aging arenas. In 2002, William P. Macht, an adjunct professor of urban planning and development in the College of Urban & Public Affairs at Portland State University, put forward four alternative plans for the preserved coliseum, created as part of a three-month development planning workshop. These particular options -- a headquarters hotel, an arts complex, a sustainable technology center and an urban home center –prove that alternatives do exist and should be more fully explored by the City before any further decisions are made.

Finally, we are concerned that the Mayor has supported demolition of the Coliseum under the mantra of “sustainability.” We question the accuracy of this assumption. Choosing new construction over reuse is rarely the most sustainable choice. New construction requires a massive expenditure of energy to manufacture or extract building materials, transport them to the construction site, and assemble them into a new building. A substantial amount of energy is already embodied in the Coliseum’s sizable steel and glass frames. The replacement of existing structural components with newly manufactured and newly extracted materials must be factored into the environmental cost if the City is to tout sustainability as an objective of this plan.

In light of community support and significant historic evidence, the National Trust asks that the reuse and renovation of Memorial Coliseum be the City’s first priority regarding the future of Rose Quarter area. The Trust also asks that the City consider the historic importance of the building relative to the rapidly diminishing number of significant modern works of architecture in the State and nationwide.

Earlier this morning, I did something I normally never do, especially on a weekend. I set the alarm. In fact, I set it for 7AM. And it was worth it to be there for the Rose Parade as it originated from inside the arena, with Memorial Coliseum's upper curtain open to allow light to pour through.

I normally am not a big parade enthusiast. When I was a kid we went to the Rose Parade, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it as an adult. They're too early for this unrepentant late sleeper. But once there, properly over-caffeinated, I really enjoyed the Americana of it all: the marching bands, the Rosarians in their white suits, the velvet-throated K103 DJs emceeing, the Boss Hog convertibles with the waving grand marshall, and of course the floats. And of course seeing the Coliseum with the curtain open was the best part.

Here are a few snapshots that I took of the parade and the building. Joining me and a few other architects who came to see the building with the curtain open for the city's central civic-cultural public event of the year were a couple of professional photographers, Jeremy Bitterman and Matthew Ginn. Those guys are much more talented shutterbugs, and their photos will be published here down the road.

For decades, one of the most striking and unique features of Portland's circa-1960 Memorial Coliseum has been hidden away: the ability to flood the arena with natural light by opening the black curtain that encloses the top of the seating bowl.

This Saturday, Portlanders will have a chance to see for themselves just how incredible this indoor-outdoor architectural experience really is. The curtain will be open for the Grand Floral Parade, which originates in the Coliseum.

You can see the effect in the above photo by legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman. When the Coliseum's curtain is open, this becomes one of the most unique arenas in the entire nation, or even the world. Can you name a single arena or concert hall in the world big enough to hold 10,000 people or more but do so in an interior building illuminated with daylight?

When I spoke with Rich Jarvis of the Rose Festival Foundation, he told me the curtain was actually open for last year's Grand Floral Parade, although no formal announcements were made. I never go to the parade anymore (used to as a child), so I had no idea. I've never heard a single person even mention the curtain being open last year. But I'm not missing this year's opportunity. I'm buying a ticket to the Coliseum for the parade, and entirely so I can see the building itself.

Jarvis also recalled his own experience watching the parade through the open curtain last year. "When you're sitting at the top of the bowl, with that curtain open it actually becomes the best seat in the house," he said. "If you're sitting on the east side, you can look out at the skyline. If you're on the river side, you can actually watch the parade as it continues outside toward downtown."

You can order tickets ($30) to see the parade from inside the Coliseum here. If you are an architect or designer in Portland, or any kind of architecture enthusiast, I strongly recommend taking advantage of this all-too-unique experience. When the Coliseum's curtain is open, this may very well be the ultimate architectural space in the city.

ADDITIONAL NOTE, 6/3/09: Apologies for the short notice, but Portland State University professor Garrett Martin's architecture class has been studying a series of housing options for the Rose Quarter area. Students will be presenting their projects from 5-9PM today at the Leftbank Building, at 240 N. Broadway. I hope to post some of their work in the days ahead.

Last week's announcement that the City of Portland would not seek to build a baseball stadium on the Memorial Coliseum site at the Rose Quarter gave Portland's grand dame of international-stye modernism a reprieve from the guillotine. But the arena is still anything but safe, both as it relates to the power brokers determining its fate and the media trying to shape the narrative with mixed results.

Two major articles this week from The Oregonian have given the Rose Quarter deal and Memorial Coliseum's preservation a longer look, although in some cases you have to turn to the end of the article to get the complicating factors.

In Monday's paper, Helen Jung wrote a front-page cover story with a headline asking, "Save the coliseum, but for what?" Helen is a quality reporter, and her story ultimately had a good mix of argument from both sides. But that's not necessarily the impression one gets if you just read the headline and the first few paragraphs or the big graph on Page 1 showing the Coliseum's declining revenues over the past five years (a $42,000 loss is projected for 2008-2009). It seems like Helen had a fair-minded approach but her headline-writing editors may have viewed the Coliseum preservation with greater skepticism.

"It has struggled for more than a decade to just break even," Jung writes early in the story. "The coliseum needs millions of dollars in fixes, from overhauling its half-century-old electrical system to replacing the roof. Its egalitarian seating arrangement, with no luxury boxes or club seats, makes the coliseum feel more like a high school gym than a venue out to make a profit."

Only when one gets to the end of the story does the financial argument include both sides. Jung cites William Macht's research proving that the Memorial Coliseum management agreement gives Oregon Arena Corporation incentive to fill the Rose Garden with events instead of the Coliseum after the Coliseum reaches break-even point.

But she also lets Blazers Vice President dispute that without a rebuttal from Macht. Isaac says there's no conspiracy about deliberate neglect on the team's part. Rather, it's the customers seeking to fill events that prefer the Jumbotron screen and newer facilities that the Rose Garden can offer, Isaac explains. But if the Coliseum were renovated properly like it should have been years ago, or if it had a renovated Rose Quarter as part of the puzzle with surrounding entertainment or amateur athletic facilities invigorating the existing 50,000 square foot Coliseum exhibition hall, the older arena would be much more attractive.

Also, Jung's point about the Coliseum seeming more like a venue for high school sports than a profit-making major arena actually points to a brand identity for the MC.

Naturally the Rose Garden arena will always be the place for major league sports and the biggest concerts. But Memorial Coliseum could supplement that by being a more amateur and local-oriented arena. Put Cordish's planned entertainment zone and Doug Obletz's MARC amateur recreation complex in the exhibition hall, add Louvre-style light wells (a la IM Pei's pyramid), and suddenly you've got the stuff the Blazers and Cordish want to add without taking away a viable extra venue with special architectural qualities.

The most important part of Jung's story may be its "Ideas for Memorial Coliseum" sidebar. Here is where the different plans are presented side by side with accompanying costs:

Entertainment district: "The project could run as much as $100 million and the team would seek some amount of public investment." And this doesn't even figure in the cost of replacing Memorial Coliseum, which the community will need in the future as the city doubles in size over the next generation.

Recreation center: "The city had shelved the project [first proposed in 2002] when backers couldn't secure grant money to cover part of the $80-$102 million cost."

Veterans Memorial Arts and Athletic Center: "The price tag would be similar to the Memorial Athletic and Recreation Center proposal's $80 million to $102 million estimate."

Updated Memorial Coliseum: "This option, identified in 2002, would have dedicated about $13 million to capital expenditures and basic building system upgrades."

Granted the Coliseum, if renovated as an arena, would ultimately take more than $13 million, especially if it were paired with a MARC or Cordish entertainment proposal in (or both) in the exhibition hall. Even so, for all the talk of how expensive a Coliseum arena renovation would be, it's a lot cheaper than building anything else.

Meanwhile, in today's Oregonian Ted Sickinger has a cover story looking at Cordish's Kansas City Power & Light District. When Sickinger visited, there were plenty of people visiting the P&L on a Friday night. And it's full of youngsters and suburbanites enthusiastically trumpeting the area's greatness. "'Any place should have a place like this,' gushes Shawn Burkhardt, a 22-year-old from Topeka, eyes wide and beer in hand. 'Definitely in Kansas City this is the spot to be on Friday and Saturday night. I guarantee it."

Notice that the young inebriated fella from outside Kansas City mentioned Friday and Saturday nights. How often is he there on a Tuesday?

Sickinger also queried another passer-by, "a tattooed 25-year-old" named Christopher Nichols, who was more skeptical. On this visit, his third, Nichols said he was giving the Power & Light District one last chance. "Everything looks the same," he told the reporter. "'The Kansas City crowd is over there,' he said, pointing south to the Crossroads District, a more Portland-style mix of art galleries, bars, restaurants and condos. 'And the Johnson County (suburban Kansas) people are here. They come from outside Kansas City and want a very sheltered environment. It's a tourist trap."

Sickinger also reports at the very end of the article on Cordish's racist policies. Initially the Power & Light district had a restrictive dress coade banning hoodies, white T-shirts and baggy pants. "The African American community took that as a slap in the face," one visitor to P&L told the reporter.

When Mayor Sam Adams's chief of staff, Tom Miller, visited the P&L site in Kansas City, he told Cordish, according to Sickinger's story, "...If you want to cooke cutter it [the P&L] and drop it into Portland, it will fail."

All this points strongly to the need for a legitimate public process. Regardless of whether you appreciate Memorial Coliseum's history and architecture, the Rose Quarter is too important a district in Portland to be planned in a smoke-filled room without public involvement.

As first reported Wednesday evening by Mark Larabee of The Oregonian (and shortly afterward by Matt Davis of the Portland Mercury), Mayor Sam Adams has announced that Memorial Coliseum has been spared from demolition.

The City of Portland and Portland Beavers owner Merritt Paulson will now focus exclusively on building a baseball stadium in Lents.

This is a time both to rejoice and to pledge continued vigilance. If Wednesday evening's news holds and a baseball stadium isn't built on the Memorial Coliseum site, it's like I told Matt Davis: It feels like the end of Star Wars when they blew up the Death Star. But notice Star Wars was only one of several chapters in the overall saga.

Memorial Coliseum, as best we can tell, will now have the opportunity for new life, and to continue as a Portland landmark for generations to come. That's something to be enormously thankful for, not just if you love modern architecture or support historic preservation, but if you care about the city itself.

At the same time, the City and the Trail Blazers will now be looking to bring significant change to the Rose Quarter site, which could include altering Memorial Coliseum so far beyond its original design that the building loses its architectural integrity -- its greatness.

The Blazers are said to be looking at an open-air music venue. That's one possibility for the Coliseum. "Don't worry, we're gonna save the roof," one insider told a member of our Friends of Memorial Coliseum grassroots group. If the Blazers take the glass walls off Memorial Coliseum, it won't be Memorial Coliseum. I'd argue the same is true with respect to the interior seating bowl.

The Coliseum experience, what makes it one of the most unique arenas in the world, is the ability to watch a game or other event from the seating bowl with natural light pouring through. It's something the Coliseum hasn't delivered for many years because its curtain around the bowl seems permanently closed. But if they could open that curtain, people who go inside will advocate for this unique place to be kept as-is.

That's not to say you can't make changes. For instance, Tom Webb had an interesting idea in an Oregonian editorial a few days ago: Why not open up PGE Park to be a public park when it's not being used for games? That would have some difficulty given that the field needs to be kept pristine. But at the Coliseum, you could absolutely make the outer areas around the seating bowl into some kind of space that remains open to the public even when there's not an event. The Coliseum could become part of Portland's wintertime playground, a place to be in the light but not the elements.

The Coliseum should not become the Blazers' new outdoor venue because it would be too drastically stripped of its gem-like quality. But how about an indoor-outdoor arena? The Coliseum could be altered in a way that opens up a little of its facade or its roof in a way that brings the outdoors in an vice versa, but maintains the Coliseum as a more viable multi-use facility instead of the single-use capacity an outdoor performance venue would serve.

As the Coliseum process over the rest of the calendar year looks at different options, we also need to pay more attention to the more than 50,000 square feet of exhibit space underground that surrounds the veterans memorial. If the City and the Blazers want to add more amenities to the Rose Quarter like restaurants, bars or more entertainment, it should go around the Coliseum in the exhibition area, not in the Coliseum itself. If we had enough room in the exhibition area to stage the Portland Auto Show there for years, surely there's enough room for a Hard Rock Cafe and a slough of racquetball courts and other amateur athletic center amenities.

In a Portland Mercury story I was interviewed for last night about the Coliseum being spared, one commenter said that I had been duped, that the plan was to gut the Coliseum for entertainment-venue stuff all along. Another said I was an "arrogant prick" for claiming the community was behind this grassroots effort.

You can't please everybody, but I certainly don't feel duped. We knew all along this was a two-part battle: save the Coliseum from demolition, and then save it from ill-advised, heavy-handed renovation. And I remain quite confident, or arrogant if you prefer, about the community being behind the Coliseum. It's not just the 8-to-1 margin that polls showed to favor the building's preservation, but the outpouring of emails, phone calls and blog comments that encouraged a small group of architects, designers and a blogger to take on a city council and two billionaires.

Thank you to everyone who joined in this effort: institutions like the National Trust, US Green Building Council and AIA; architects and designers like Stuart Emmons, Rick Potestio, Don Rood, Randy Higgins, Peter Meijer, Paul Falsetto and Joseph Readdy; blogger/columnist Barry Johnson of The Oregonian and blogger Tim DuRoche of Portland Spaces; great reporters at the Portland Mercury like Matt Davis and Sarah Mirk; editorialists like Mark Zusman at Willamette Week; and academics like Portland State University's Will Macht.

The City Council vote that had been scheduled for May 7 to select a site for Major League Soccer at PGE Park and a baseball stadium (at the Rose Quarter or elsewhere) for the minor-league Beavers has once again been delayed.

Sources say the Council is still looking at a number of options for where to build a Beavers stadium if it doesn't happen in the Rose Quarter. Right now, the leading candidates seem to be Lents Park and a co-location at PGE Park (at least temporarily) for the Beavers and Timbers.

The Lents site has strong points in its favor. It would be connected to a new MAX line a block away. The neighborhood has indicated they want the stadium. Lents is an urban renewal area that has been languishing for a generation without much improvement.

Building a baseball stadium in Lents would go a long way toward vitalizing the Portland Development Commission's Lents Town Center urban renewal plan that has already been in place for years.

There are two or three challenges with Lents for AAA baseball--parking and a net loss of park space--but sources say those problems appear to be surmountable.

The biggest challenge, parking, could be alleviated with a shuttle bus system connecting the baseball park to massive nearby parking lots at two malls: Clackamas Town Center and Mall 205. Trimet has already gone on record saying this plan would work from their perspective. There are also numerous surface parking lots in Lents that, if there were a baseball stadium there, would give private sector entrepreneurs a chance to make money on parking. Plus, the two malls would be excited to be involved with the shuttle because it'd put people in their parking lots, at least some of which would be likely to go shopping.

The other challenge, a net loss of open space from devoting Lents Park to baseball, could be not only accounted for but would actually improve Lents overall. There has already been open space identified along Johnson Creek that the city could make into a parkland. In fact, it would be more beneficial than Lents Park in contributing to preservation of wetland and wildlife habitat. Plus, one of the local leaders most vocal in advocating for no net loss of park space, Mike Houck of the Urban Greenspace Institute, has already given approval to Lents Park (when it was looked at originally) as a baseball site if these conditions were met.

Even Merritt Paulson was into Lents when he and his staff visited the site. Regardless of what reservations he may express now, based on the demolished Coliseum site being more of a revenue stream, Paulson has explicitly told City Council members he likes the stadium there.

In fact, it's very possible attendance numbers at the Lents site could be higher than the dismal numbers the Beavers usually get at PGE Park (less than 2,000 per game for two recent sunny-evenings against the defending conference champions). People in Gresham, Vancouver, Clackamas, Oregon City and outer Southeast Portland would all be closer to the stadium. They'd have a lot easier time getting there by a range of options, not least of which is that Interstate 205 is a few feet away.

What's more, at least one of the two City Council members who supported baseball at the Memorial Coliseum/Rose Quarter site, Commissioner Randy Leonard, has preferred the Lents site all along. Bringing back the baseball park to Lents after the idea seemed to be dead would actually help Leonard's relationship with constituents in that neighborhood, a few of whom felt let down by the baseball plan going away after it seemed to be going forward in Lents last time.

Our group working to preserve Memorial Coliseum has been resistant to advocating for one non-Rose Quarter baseball stadium site over another (say, Lents versus Terminal 1 or Delta Park). But if baseball went to Lents, there seems little reason for anyone to complain.

What about going back to the idea of co-locating the Beavers and Timbers in PGE Park? After all, that's by far the most cost-effective. And it remains unclear whether having a soccer-only venue is merely a preference for Major League Soccer or a requirement. At the very least, PGE Park could be a temporary home for both, with MLS de-coupled from the Rose Quarter plan as we take a proper amount of time to look at where to build the Beavers a stadium.

Process is worth talking about in and of itself as well. There arguably hasn't been nearly enough of it regarding the Rose Quarter. Or, if you talk to certain City Hall veterans, there's already been a lot of process about this area in years past.

If one were to hypothetically imagine the baseball stadium going somewhere other than the Rose Quarter, and we then engage in a process to re-imagine Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter for the future, what do we want that process to look like?

I believe a Rose Quarter process would benefit from going a different route than what we too often see here: a developer led system in which three developer-determined options are created from an RFP (request-for-proposal) process. Instead, we need to follow a model more like the Armory, where citizens are allowed to be part of the vision-making and developers play a more supplementary role. We have to have developers involved on the financial/pragmatic side, but should they be our dreamers?

Naturally this comes within the context of developers often being great forces for good in the community, and excellent place-makers sometimes. And it's not like developer-led proposals don't involve designers. So no offense meant to any of the developers reading this, some of whom I admire a great deal. Even so, I think the process of public projects, at least in certain cases like this, might benefit from a new way of working toward our shared goals.

As for the Coliseum itself, there is also an effort underway to move away from the protective, protection-oriented campaign to save the building from demolition and transition the conversation to something more aspirational and pragmatic. In other words, a renovated and revitalized Memorial Coliseum could be the centerpiece of a better future Rose Quarter.

Few cities in America or the world can offer two differently sized arenas available to work in tandem. What's more, the uniqueness of the Coliseum's design -- as a transparent, light filled space -- would allow it to act as a kind of indoor/outdoor public space.

Say it's raining on some January Saturday afternoon in 2014. You and your kids want to get out of the house, but everything seems to involve being outdoors getting wet or spending money in some retail setting. What if you could go to Memorial Coliseum and enjoy the openness of the glass box inside, with places to sit and congregate and eat and drink, even if there wasn't an even there? Or perhaps you could play racquetball in the MARC amateur athletic complex that's moved into the 50,000 square foot former Coliseum exhibition space, its underground now filled with natural light from skylights and light wells. Or if you don't mind spending a few bucks after all, the Blazers' planned bevy of restaurants and entertainment is there as well.

I also love the idea of Memorial Coliseum's central arena taking on the identity of amateur athletics and entertainment as a counterbalance to the NBA and traveling concert tours in the Rose Garden. Brand the Coliseum as the place where we hold high school basketball tournaments, or even a Friday night game of the week during the regular season like PGE Park functions during football season for prep teams. Then there's all the Rose Festival stuff that's gone on there for years. Maybe it becomes a place for public town hall-style conversations.

Regardless of which idea hits or misses here, the city and Oregon Arena Corporation could be so much more creative in giving the Coliseum a purpose beyond just being the older, smaller (if vastly more elegant and open) sister to the Rose Garden.

The point is that both what progressives (about urban planning and architecture) want in terms of preservation for the Coliseum, and what business or government people care about in terms of economic viability and a reason to come there, can be made to work together.

Ultimately this isn't about just saving Memorial Coliseum (although it's the treasure here), but about re-imagining the entire Rose Quarter as a grand public space for the city.

The proposed demolition of the modern architecture landmark Memorial Coliseum has been steadily been gaining attention beyond Portland and Oregon's borders.

The London-based World Architecture News is the latest to pick up the scent of folly, hubris and ignorance coming out of the Coliseum demo plan. Check out this editorial by WAN's Matthew Freedman:

In 1965, along with 20,000 others, Allen Ginsberg saw the Beatles play Skidmore Owings and Merrill’s Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, and then he wrote a poem about it: “the million children / … / become one animal / in the New World Auditorium”.

In 2009 the Coliseum finds itself at that difficult age. Threatened with the prospect of demolition in recent weeks, it appears not quite old enough to be widely perceived as venerable heritage. Yet it’s not so young or unimpressive that it hasn’t found a nostalgic place in the hearts of locals, and an aesthetic one amongst architects and design buffs.

The place was only five years old when the Beatles invaded, and Ginsberg clearly saw its openness and modernity – the windowed curtain walls sitting around a concrete arena - as part of the same spirit of optimism and youthfulness embodied in the band’s triumph.

Yet their apparent absence as factors in the decision-making process – until dissenters raised their voice in objection - highlights the bemusing public sector thought processes that often accompany this type of redevelopment.

And the new policy of a renovated, repurposed Coliseum and new stadium elsewhere comes with a familiar caveat: it will cost millions more from the public purse than the original plan. This places the guilty burden of increased spending for taxpayers on the victorious objectors, and somehow implies that they may be as much a nuisance as a legitimate voice of dissent.

The same tensions between preservation, progress, and public taste get played out all over the world, all the time. Still, the parallels point up the truth that the State often falls down on preserving crucial smaller examples of enlightened public building. Their survival so often depends on the vigilance of an interested community, even where this boils down to simple bafflement at why huge change is needed. But it’s easy for inertia and other priorities to win out over that. And therefore it’s encouraging when structures that are still barely on the radar of public architectural taste can be the focus of a fight.

A thought occurred to me many months ago that if we cannot review demolitions in Portland because of their potential historic value, perhaps its time we review demolitions for their impacts on environmental, social, and cultural sustainability. This is especially important in light of the fact that Portland’s Historic Resource Inventory is more than 25 years old, with no current funding on the table to have it updated. The first inventory remains incomplete and outdated as numerous neighborhoods were never surveyed or have since been annexed into the city limits. This means that Portlanders are potentially losing historic resources - we don’t even know we have - on a weekly basis. And all of this can occur without review or notification.

Still, I try to remain hopeful. The current controversy over the proposed demolition of our “glass palace,” the Memorial Coliseum, has brought to light the inherent connections between preservation and sustainability. Letters from architects, university professors, the US Green Building Council, the National Trust, and my own organization - the Bosco-Milligan Foundation - have emphasized both the architectural significance of the building and the un-sustainable solution of demolishing, once again, a perfectly usable building. I hope that the yet-to-be-determined outcome of this controversy begins a new chapter in Portland, one that truly makes the connection between preservation and sustainability by recognizing the negative impacts of needless building demolition.

As reported by the Portland Mercury's Matt Davis earlier this morning, architect Stuart Emmons addressed City Council today about how saving Memorial Coliseum was the way for Portland to "walk the talk" on being a sustainable design leader.

"We are teed up to become a leading sustainability capital and design capital, but it will take more than just talk," Emmons told the Council. "We will be judged by our actions. Everything we do and are involved in should back up our words physically. We are not doing this in a coordinated, thorough way right now."

"Let's preserve Memorial Coliseum. Not only say 'preserve' it, but really preserve it. Preserve its design integrity respectfully and make it into a sustainable best practice," he said. "Good sustainable practices call for building reuse. We will be nationally chastised for tearing down Memorial Coliseum, or marring its design integrity, no matter how we spin it. We will be a poster child for what not to do. It's the wrong message to send."

Emmons offered the Council a handout filled with pictures of the building as well as New York's Penn Station, the symbolic lesson in preservation from the past. It was enough to garner praise from Commissioner Nick Fish after Emmons' testimony. His brochure also included a picture of a 1960 Corvette, with text saying it "needs new tiers, a new carburetor, and a new paint job. Should we junk it? Or should we restore it?"

He also made three arguments about finances for the Coliseum.

First, restoring Memorial Coliseum is, as Davis described, "a perfect shovel-ready project", and restoring it is likely to be more aesthetically pleasing, and cheaper, than building a replacement.

Second, the $200,000 to $500,000 the coliseum is losing is "peanuts relatively," he said, "and clearly under a new deal and new management, Memorial Coliseum can easily pay for itself."

Third, Emmons urged the council to consider the economic value lost by a demolished Coliseum. "The assessor values the Colieseum at $57.1million, which is a fraction of its replacement value. Has the Paulson team added the $57.1 million to their $55 million?" he asked.

Emmons also had a wonderfully written opinion piece in the Sunday Oregonian, providing a much-needed counter balance to the editorial board's advocacy for the landmark Coliseum's destruction. Here is the text of the architect's essay:

I walked around Memorial Coliseum at sunrise today. Its setting on North Interstate Avenue is amazing, I never noticed this view before: a huge glass wall hanging over a landscaped berm. The plaza we all know was serene at that hour. As I talked to a security guard about the building he was patrolling, a smile came to his face. Memorial Coliseum is so special to Portland and should be saved and restored.

Designed by the Portland office of the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill in 1960, the coliseum is an excellent example of International Style Modern architecture. Along with Pietro Belluschi's Equitable Building (on Southwest Sixth and Stark) and the Standard Insurance Building (on Southwest Fifth and Taylor), Memorial Coliseum is one of Portland's three premier Modern buildings.

No other Modern buildings in our city rise to this level of high art. The three are different in their approach and use but share one of the main tenets of Modernism: a deceivingly simple, powerful expression of a concept through the use of form, proportion, structure and composition.

In the case of Memorial Coliseum and the Standard, their sites also become a key part of the composition: the Standard set in a passive plaza, with gardens and fountains; Memorial Coliseum now set on a plaza on one side and the landscape berm on the other, setting the stage for a masterwork.

Great examples of this high level of achievement in other cities would include works by Le Corbusier (such as Pavillon Suisse in Paris), Skidmore Owings and Merrill (such as the Lever House in New York), Mies van der Rohe (such as the Seagram Building in New York) and, on a large scale, Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia in Brazil. If the coliseum were a painting, a work of fine art, it would occupy a special place in our art museum and be cherished.

The beauty and sculptural power of Memorial Coliseum derive from its simplicity. Complex problems of function and structure have been culled down to the most basic, minimal expression through an amazing level of rigor, engineering and passion: a huge, magnificently simple, beautifully proportioned, exquisitely detailed glass box encasing a gracefully curved form. It is this contrast between the geometric and the organic forms that gives "the saucer in the box" its true power and brilliance.

Outside, the compositional ideas continue, with a curved canopy set in front of the box, the second organic form, and below, two sunken plazas, one holding a fountain that quiets the space in front of a memorial wall carrying the names of people from Oregon who gave their lives in war.

Back to the box. The box is enormous, and yet it has only four columns. Huge trusses span the whole interior, keeping the interior free for the graceful seating bowl. And the best and unique part of this building are the curtains around the bowl. When open, sunlight pours into the arena, negating the need for most artificial light. This is an extraordinary space, a curved bowl hovering in a glass box for shelter.

Walk out of the arena, and one glass box is in a towering space of glass and form overlooking the river and city beyond. No other public building in our city takes advantage of its site so well and offers such breathtaking views of the skyline. Watching the sun set over Portland from Memorial Coliseum gives me a great feeling about my city.

And so, we have not cared for this treasure as it deserves. No worries. It is still here and ready when we are, when we dare to take the leap. Many Modern buildings are in the same state. But, many have been restored to reach their original intent and grandeur.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim and Saarinen's TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport just went through major renovations that have brought these buildings back to their original magnificence. Skidmore Owings and Merrill's 1952 Lever House went through a major restoration and now it is back to its best condition. These are just a few examples.

Look no farther than to Portland's City Hall and see a wonderful building that was given new life with a comprehensive historic restoration and seismic upgrade, completed in 1998. We love coming into our city building and are jealous of those who are fortunate to work in it.

Imagine a reconditioned Memorial Coliseum glistening against the evening sky, its beautiful curved form inside. People all about. Imagine the pride we all would have in our city, the city that preserves and cherishes its history, its past successes, and looks to its future. This is our Portland.

Great buildings in great cities need to be cherished and taken care of, for they are the riches of the city and tell the story of our place. Memorial Coliseum is part of our history, and one of our treasures.

As reported Monday by the Daily Journal of Commerce's Sam Bennett, the City Council has scheduled a vote for next Thursday, May 7 Wednesday, May 6, on a pre-development agreement to go ahead with renovations for PGE Park in order to make it ready for Major League Soccer by 2011.

How does this relate to Memorial Coliseum? If the vote on PGE Park is de-coupled from the issue of building a baseball stadium at the Rose Quarter, that's at least a temporary victory in that it allows the soccer plan to go through while the Coliseum and Rose Quarter get figured out. If the vote also stipulates a building of the Portland Beavers' minor league baseball stadium in a particular place other than the Memorial Coliseum/Rose Quarter site, like Lents Park or the Terminal 1 site in Northwest Portland near the Fremont Bridge, that's of course the ultimate victory for the Coliseum.

One thing to say about the baseball stadium itself: Those of us involved in the grassroots effort to save Memorial Coliseum have more or less decided that it's folly for us to get too involved in debating the merits of any particular non-Rose Quarter location for the baseball stadium. Lents, for example, has many things going for it, but like any site, there are complicating factors. To work towards preserving Memorial Coliseum is our greater focus. And if City Council decides that the Coliseum is untouchable, or at least not to be demolished, then the baseball stadium location becomes moot to our preservation effort.

Although much of the debate about saving the Coliseum has been focused on aesthetics, the preservation debate also requires pragmatic talk about economics.

Portland State University real estate professor William Macht's research shows that the Coliseum has tremendous untapped economic potential in its current form: as an arena. If the City were to re-write the management agreement so there's no longer a disincentive for Oregon Arena Corporation (the Blazers' Rose Garden and Coliseum manager) to turn a profit on the Coliseum, it could host many more events and thus bring in revenue for long-overdue repairs.

The Blazers are said to be seeking an open-air music venue. In June, July and August, that would be terrific. But what about the rain-inclined other nine months of the year? A better plan would be to turn Memorial Coliseum into an indoor-outdoor venue. Perhaps the riverfront facade could be opened up, or even a retractible roof installed.

The Blazers have also discussed putting their planned "Live!" entertainment in the Coliseum, mostly restaurants and bars. Making this work is not an impossibility, but there is strong reason to be very skeptical about how this would taint the Coliseum's architecture. A better plan would be to make the Coliseum, still as an arena, into the centerpiece of a redevelopment scheme surrounding it. Put the "Live!" stuff on the river to better integrate the Rose Quarter wit the huge untapped potential of the waterfront at the old Thunderbird motel, or on the grounds of the Rose Quarter between and around the two arenas.

As far as anyone knows, the City Council vote comes down to a split with Commissioner Dan Saltzman in the middle. Amanda Fritz and Nick Fish seem to be against Memorial Coliseum's demolition, while Commissioner Randy Leonard and Mayor Sam Adams are either for its demolition or undecided, given that Lents could still be the chosen destination for the baseball stadium.

From Adams' perspective, the Rose Quarter initially seemed like the means for getting a baseball stadium deal done. But to his credit, the Mayor listened to the thundering chorus of voices opposing Memorial Coliseum's demolition. (Polls by KEX radio and the Portland Tribune found a more than 8-to-1 opposition to the demolition plan.) It probably would best serve the mayor to get any kind of deal done, be it a baseball stadium in Lents or elsewhere, before the June 30 date arrives and the chance for his opponents to issue a recall campaign. The mayor risks further incurring the ire of those seeking proper time for a more drawn-out Portland style process if he goes too fast, but having this issue resolved would serve him even better.

Meanwhile, those seeking to join the Memorial Coliseum preservation effort are encouraged to keep the pressure on City Council by emailing all 5 members and asking them to save this gem.

To that end, as you can see in the pictures accompanied in this post (the first two were taken by the legendary architectural photographer Julius Schulman - the latter scanned as best we could over a two-page fold, and the final one is of the Coliseum's construction), we're continuing to unearth pictures of our beloved Coliseum that better articulate what make it special. Not only is this a pure and beautiful glass box, but watching an event in the seating bowl can be done during daytime with natural light pouring into the space. Think about it for a minute: of all the basketball games or arts performances or political rallies you've ever been to anywhere in the world, how many of them could daylight one of those performances?